CD Session Burner 3.0

CD Session Burner is a tool that allows you to burn files on CD/DVD supporting both recordable and rewritable mediums.

It is a little smarter than Disk Burner, the built in tool in Mac OS X. It can write multisession CDs. Every session is mounted as a separate volume. This is very useful when you use an incremental backup mode.

The producer said that it takes about 15 MB of disc space for every session, but depending on your configuration, the number of the sessions that are recognized is limited. The producer himself recommends you to use maximum 17 sessions even though you can add even more.

The bad thing about using the multisession support is the fact that it takes some time for mounting every session when there are many of them. Another thing that isn't nice is the fact that this functionality works only with CDs and it's unavailable for the DVDs, thus the available storage space is pretty limited.

The CD/DVD RW erasing engine is quite well implemented. If you want to erase a CD RW you won't be able to erase only one session. It's all or nothing. The full erase functionality is not implemented into CD Session Burner. The program does only quick erases. This means it deletes only the TOC (Table Of Contents) while the data remains on the medium but it won't be accessible for regular optical drives and the disc is shown as blank.

The compilation can be created very easily by dragging and dropping the files/folders you would like to burn. If you want to add/remove a file, you have to use the menu because there isn't implemented a contextual menu for add/remove actions. This is annoying especially for the remove actions.

It doesn't has the support for burning a CD/DVD image. So if you would like to burn, for example, an ISO image you won't be able to burn it as an image, you can burn it only as a file.

The 'Burn' button opens the burning options dialog. You can select the burning speed, and the check-disc option in order to verify it after the burning. You can also check the eject flag, after the burning or the test only flag if you would like just to test its functionality. The last flag is about the session closing and it is automatically checked for DVDs.

Pluses: it has the support for burning multisession CDs, it cat be used very easily, it doesn't need to copy your data into a burn folder, so the burning process is a little faster from this point of view.

Drawbacks / flaws: it can't burn multisession DVDs, it can't burn CD/DVD images, it can't make a full erase of the medium. The multisession CDs won't be cross platform supported, so usually they won't be readable on Windows, for example.

In conclusion: is a pretty useful tool with a little bit many features than Disk Burner.

version reviewed: 3.0