February 5 - 11:15am EST   Disc Cover 2.3 ($35) helps users create CD and DVD labels, covers, tray inserts, folding booklets, and more. The application includes over 250 professionally made designs that users can customize with their own images or with some of the included images. Along with several performance enhancements and fixes the update includes support for DiscT@2 which allows to etch text and graphics on the data side of DVD discs using a LabelFlash-enabled drive. [Download - 52.3MB] [full story]

June 26 - 4:35pm EDT   A Tohoku University research team at the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials claim to have developed a DVD that is capable of holding 42GB of data, or nearly 9 times as much as a standard DVD. The Japanese researchers achieved this feat by using V-shaped as opposed to flat pits on the DVD's recording surface, which allows for more data-recording space. The same method can be applied to CDs as well. [full story]

May 27 - 4:30pm EDT   LaCie on Tuesday unveiled a new Blu-ray disc burner, capable of writing to single-layer media at 4x speeds across Firewire or USB 2.0. The drive retains LaCie's durable d2 aluminum casing and boasts whisper quiet operation while burning 25GB and 50GB BD-R and BD-RE media, in addition to all common CD and DVD formats. LaCie is offering the dual-interface Blu-ray burner for $650, available from LaCie directly and authorized retailers. [full story]

May 5 - 6:30pm EDT   Every Mac with a Superdrive can burn your iTunes music files to a CD, your iMovie video files to a DVD, and your digital photographs (or any files and folders) to both a CD/DVD. However, if you want to do more than ordinary CD/DVD burning, you may want to look at Roxio’s latest version of Toast Titanium 9, a multi-purpose optical media authoring application that can burn CDs/DVDs and do a whole lot more. [full story]