What is Discribe 4?

CharisMac’s Discribe 4.0 is a CD-burning application that attempts to be like Roxio’s (formerly Adaptec’s) Toast... in terms of interface design and ease of use. Although 4.0 is more intuitive than the previous version, it’s not compatible with programs that use online CD databases (CDDB), such as iTunes and SoundJam.

When you launch Discribe, a simple window with three buttons (Data CD, Audio CD, and Copy a CD) greets you. Clicking Data CD brings up a window into which you can drag files and folders to bum a CD. You can also make a CD to CD-R copy If you have both a CD drive from which to read and a CD-R (or CD-RW) drive for copying.

However, the program needs some polishing in terms of creating and copying audio CDs. If you are using Apple’s iTunes or some other program that retrieves CD-track listings from CDDB, that program will rename any commercial audio CD in your CD drive with the album title, and the tracks will display the album’s song names in the Rnder. Although this is a welcome feature for music lovers, Discribe will give you an error message if you try to copy an audio CD that has renamed tracks. The only workaround Is to turn off CDDB extensions.

If you have only one drive to work with, you’ll need to extract individual audio files to the hard drive whenever you want to make a duplicate audio CD. It would be more practical if Discribe could save an audio CD as an image file, which is essentially a copy of the original CD in a single data file.

At the most basic level. Discribe can burn CDs, but it requires you to work around some bugs — particularly when it comes to burning audio CDs. You should grab Roxio’s Toast instead — it’s more intuitive and has more features for the same price.

Tokuda, Andrew. (June 2001). Discribe 4.0. MacAddict. (pg. 50).

Download Discribe 4 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.0

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver