When you talk about file backup software for Mac OS, Roxio Toast Titanium is THE one. Or is there anything else? In fact, Dragon Burn never came to our attention until just a few days ago. Dragon Burn could be another file backup software product that you might be interested in. It doesn’t have video compression functions likeToast Titanium. But Dragon Burn has a couple of nice functions, which Toast Titanium doesn’t support. Nonetheless, if you have never heard of Dragon Burn, simply, we don’t want you to have high expectations. So let us say at front that this software title has not been updated since June 14, 2005.

When you launch Dragon Burn 4.1, you will see a small window with 9 menu icons. (See Screenshot 01) Disable Don’t show description option at the left corner of the screen. And you will get a description for each burning type by placing your cursor over it.

No matter which burning type you choose, you always have an option of whether to burn a disc or save files in an image disc. (See Screenshot 01) Do you have an external DVD drive? That’s no problem. Click on the Recorder button at the bottom. Under this drop-down menu, you will get a list of drives plus an option that says CD/DVD Image Writer. If you choose this image type, files will be saved in an image disc type called ncd.

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I just said “this image type” earlier. That means there is at least one more image type that Dragon Burn supports. It’s ISO. Roxio Toast Titanium doesn’t support ISO. ISO is a good option if you exchange files with Windows users because they can’t read DMG discs.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the burning types. The burning types at the top row are concerned with music. If you want to create an audio CD, simply choose the one that says Audio CD. If you just want to back up audio files, choose MP3 CD. We actually tested MP3 CD. After dropping 15 MP3 files (94.5 MB), it took Dragon Burn just one second to make a disc image (.ncd). Yes, that’s super fast.

We also tested Dragon Burn’s Audio CD function. (See Screenshot 04) Using the same 15 MP3 files, It took Dragon Burn just 1 minute and 14 seconds to make an audio CD image. That sounds fast enough, doesn’t it? We also tested Toast Titanium 8’s equivalent function, Audio CD. (See Screenshot 05) Actually, Toast Titanium was even faster because it took only 45 seconds.

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Dragon Burn is not a slideshow application. So even if you set the burn type to Picture CD, you won’t get direct access to iPhoto’s library. But, instead, what you can simply do is open iPhoto and select photos. Then drag and drop the selected photos onto Drag Burn. (See Screenshot 07)

And we are particularly interested in Dragon Burn’s Video functions. If you click on the downward-looking arrow button on Video, you will get three options. (See Screenshot 08) If you choose VCD or SVCD, you need to drag an MPEG file. Actually, it has to be compressed in MPEG-1. If you select an MPEG-2 file, you will see an error message. The format must be MPEG, so you cannot even drop an AVI or MOV file unlike Toast Titanium.

How do you use its VIDEO_TS option? If you select a Video_TS folder by pressing the Add File(s)/Folder(s) button, something will go wrong because you will create a new Video_TS folder. So what you should do instead is to drag the content of a TS_folder into Dragon Burn’s VIDEO_TS. (See Screenshot 08)

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One interesting feature of Dragon Burn is overburn. (See Screenshot 11) There are not many Mac applications that support this function. Another Mac application supporting this feature is ProjectOmega.org’s FireStarter FX. What is overburn, by the way? Suppose that you have a disc image whose file size is 750 MB. If your CD/DVD-burn software supports overburn, then you might be able to burn this image with a 700 MB or 650 MB CD. It’s a nice-to-have function, which Roxio Toast Titanium doesn’t support.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the beginning, Dragon Burn hasn’t been updated for more than two years. So we don’t know the future of this software. Dragon Burn lets you import only an MPEG (MPEG-1) file to burn a VCD or SVCD. Unlike Toast, Dragon Burn doesn’t come with any type of video compression functions. So Roxio Toast Titanium is superior in handling video files. Nonetheless, this 2-year-old Mac software title has at least two nice-to-have features. No.1, you can create disc images in ISO. The fact is that there are not many Mac applications supporting this image type. No. 2, Dragon Burn supports overburn. But it’s also true that days when we burn CDs are pretty much over. Most people burn a DVD other than a CD to back up files nowadays.

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MacHouse recommendation: We don’t know the prospect of this software as it hasn’t been updated for more than two years. So we can’t give it a But-It! recommendation. But if you can afford, Dragon Burn is still nice to have. It lets you create disc images in ISO, which is very nice.






Dragon Burn 4 is a product of NewTech Infosystems.

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