Nowadays, everybody can afford buying an optical drive able to write CDs and DVDs, and most people have CD/DVD collections that sometimes contain thousands of discs. The first thing to do when you burn a lot of custom discs is to keep them catalogued into a database for easier retrieval, but there's also another thing that helps here: labeling.

Having different labels on each of your CDs and DVDs makes it much easier than finding the fourth Sony CD located after those twenty Verbatim DVDs...and just think what happens if last time when you used it, it shifted its position to left or right...I think I made my point - custom CD/DVD covers are not something that can be skipped, but a necessary evil (you have to pay a small amount of money for the program and the printing gear necessary to print the covers, or write your labels by hand...).

My target from the cover editors' family is called CD Label Designer, it reached the version numbered 3.2.2, build 322, and comes to me as a shareware release having a 3.72MB installation kit. I suppose that you got it, you installed it (no problem there, so the setup process should finish in a flash) and now you're running it for the first time...let's check this program together and see what can be done with it!

When you fire up the program for the first time, you are welcomed by the Configuration Wizard, and I advise you to follow its steps now to avoid problems later (I skipped the wizard at this time, and got errors later when trying to read CD content, because the optical drive wasn't chosen). During this configuration stage, you can choose the drive you want to use for reading, setup the CDDB connectivity and basic options for the default label design. Additional settings can be changed from the Options area, but I'll leave that for later.

Now, let's follow the steps required for creating a new cover design. There are two ways for this, the first one being the wizard's way, while the other gives you the freedom to do whatever you like, but the best way for a beginner is the assisted work. Once you get used to the program, you can skip the wizard and work your way through on your own, but that's your homework for the future, my task now is to show you what can be done with the wizzie...

There are three big things you have to choose when using the New Label Wizard - template, title text and background image. After these, you can choose to save or/and print the label immediately.

Each cover template has different labels available, and this is where I'll mention the two remaining ways to start a design. The first one is to create a new cover from an existing template, and the last, to start a new design from scratch and choose which elements should be visible and their characteristics from the Label properties screen.

There are enough extra tools built into this program to make your life easier. You can add different shapes to your designs, use basic image effects such as blur, sharpen, emboss and others on the pictures you insert into your covers and much more. Everything comes into a skinnable, modern interface that's easy to customize and use.

The remaining settings from the Options area that I told you about earlier allow you to select default zoom and unit of measure, number of undo levels and print settings.

This is not a program for recording companies, but it's a worthy tool for home collectors, and I suggest you to give it a spin, it won't waste your time!

The Good

CD Label Designer is small, easy to use and has a lot of features. Its Help content is excellent, and everything comes for a very good price.

The Bad

Although most popular image formats are supported for import operations, it would be nice to have the PSD format added to the list. Another interesting feature to have is the ability to create CD/DVD envelope labels, at least for me...but I am sure that there are other people around who will find this useful.

The Truth

I wasn't crazy about labeling my discs so far, but I may reconsider this and start creating my own designs and print them...when my time allows it, and that's not going to be anytime soon. Anyway, the point is that CD Label Designer is the last item added on my midterm wish list, and it may land on yours too, after checking it out. This is it, last words: check this out!

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: