LiquidCD, Liquid Burning Tool?

Although Roxio's Toast is seen as the king of burning applications on the Mac, and has been around and on top for some time, there are also many alternatives. Many feel that Toast, although good, had grown slow and bloated over the past versions, and is not as good a tool as it could be. Others are deterred by the price tag, which can be a bit steep if all you want to do is burn a few CDs every now and then. Whatever the reason, if you are looking for alternatives to Toast, there are many to choose from, such as LiquidCD.

What it does
Like all programs of its kind, LiquidCD burns information to optical media. In order to better help it do this job, it can also handle various types if disk images that it can both create from disks and burn to disk. It can format disks in various ways to make them visible on Macs and PCs and both, as well as letting you make custom configurations.

Working with it
When it comes to old-fashioned data, LiquidCD is very simple to work with. Simply drag or add what you want to burn, Use the properties button to name and give your new disk an icon, and then hit Burn. At this point, you can set the disk file system, and various other burn options. Alternatively, you can choose to save the yet unburned disk as a disk image.

Making copies of disks is just as easy. You can burn from disk images here, or you can simply pop in a disk in order to make a copy of it. The important thing that needs to be remembered when making copies of disks with LiquidCD is that it does not make identical copies of the original… it simply copies all the files on it. This has the effect of rendering it useless for the purpose of, say, backing up a game CD; however, it makes the process incredibly fast when it comes to plain simple old data that you want to duplicate.

Audio CD woes
Audio CDs are something that every burning program knows how to do; however, it all comes down to how this is integrated with other applications. Sure, you can drag the files from the finder and that's that; but since everyone uses iTunes, and this program has iTunes integration, that seems like a much better approach.

Unfortunately, the iTunes integration is incredibly poor, to say the least. You can open up a drawer with your iTunes library - something that many programs use - but which, in the case of LiquidCD, is an awful thing. All the tracks are simply dumped in that drawer in the order that the program finds them. At this point you might think that it is not a problem as you can use the search field at the bottom to find the album you are looking for. Think again. The search field only looks in the track names. At this point, the add album button seems like the best choice… simply select a track that you know it belongs to an album and add it. This has the surprising effect of dumping as many tracks as possible into the list, until the media storage capacity is reached. The tracks that are added have nothing to do with the selected track or the album it belongs to, being simply all the albums it can find, in order. Not ideal.

As I gave up trying to add tracks through the iTunes integration interface, I decided to see if it can be done manually, through drag and drop. LiquidCD accepted the tracks I dragged in from iTunes, and even took the album art and other associated metadata; in fact, it was all good… except for one thing. The tracks were in a completely new order.
The worst part is there is no logic to this order, no matter how I sort the tracks in iTunes, this program chooses to dismiss it, so your only choice left is to reorder them manually. Simply adding the files from the Finder worked as expected, and it would be highly recommended considering how badly implemented the other two methods are.

Pictures and photos
Unfortunately, as I do not make use of iPhoto, I was unable to see if the integration was as good as the iTunes one.

However, adding images from the Finder worked well, and they were kept grouped in the way they were added. The names of the images can be changed, but they cannot be reordered in any way should you wish it, so make sure they come in the right way because that's how they will stay. LiquidCD will show a small preview of the images, which is nice because you can see them as you are making the CD. What is less nice is that these previews are being constantly redrawn, and it is slow and annoying. I only put in 36 images, but even scrolling through them was painfully slow, I don't even want to think what would happen if you filled a CD with images.

The Good

Very practical when it comes to working with data and burning everyday backups.

The Bad

Very poor integration with iTunes and terribly slow when working with images.

The Truth

For general data, this program is quite efficient, fast and reliable; still, for very specific types of disks you'd better look for something else.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: