Have you ever felt the need to personalize the discs you're burning? For a long time, I had no other tools to do this than soft tip pens to write the contents on them using the best hand drawn fonts I could do, but then I got an awesome CD Writer from Yamaha, the CRW-F1E, and started to burn tattoos on my CDs. Those times are gone, because that drive unfortunately died, and Yamaha is no longer making them (just for the record, the drive worked perfectly during all the time I had it, and died because of reasons independent of its design and reliability), but today we have a new technology, called LightScribe. Unfortunately, the LightScribe compatible discs are expensive, harder to find and, most important of all, I don't have a LightScribe compatible CD/DVD burning drive, but I just found out about a new release of a disc labeling software for Mac, and I have to tell you some words about it!

Today, SmileOnMyMac released DiscLabel 4.1, the latest version of its excellent CD/DVD label design program for the Mac. The novelties of this new version are its support for exporting in BMP and PNG file formats, as well as new image montage options. The new HP injket printers that print directly to inkjet-printable discs are also supported from this moment, and other bug fixes and enhancements have been included. The operating system required by DiscLabel 4.1 is Mac OS X 10.4 or later, and its retail price is 32.95$.

If you're new to this software, then you have to find out some things about it. DiscLabel can import track lists from iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, Finder and Toast, comes with predesigned templates but can also create custom designs from scratch, is able to automate label creation using AppleScript, and above everything, this is the best design solution for LightScribe on Mac, or at least that's what the producer claims, and I have nothing to say against it. Even a free LightScribe image package is available as a separate download, so if any of these sounds interesting to you, feel free to check it out!