DiscLabel NEATO Edition

Having purchased Fellows/Neato 50 CD . DVD matte labels i would like to get a free template. It would be helpful NOT to to have to go here. Not too great at including templates in pack

I had come across this Mac version of the DiscLabel NEATO Edition software after talking to a friend who recommended the PC version. Disclabel has some good ideas here, but the software needs to be far more user friendly than it is. Don't be looking for much in the way of help files to help you through your initial exposure to the software either, the help files (for several versions - the latest as of 5/2/05 is 2.3.1) are not included on the install CD. You must log on to their website to view their help - meager as it is. You are, in essence, flying blind in a snow storm here.

Importing your own graphics is cumbersome. You cannot drag and drop your artwork on to a blank template; the software is designed, literally, to import directly from other software libraries - such as iPhoto or iTunes. Once there, the cryptic alignment tools aren't of much help without documentation they so desperately need.

There's no print preview either. Although it is relatively simple to use the pop-up menu to select your printer and the corresponding paper, you'll have no idea what you'll get until you print it out. Using my Epson R200, I created two of my own CDR labels, but my prints looked nothing like what I could view on screen (from Photoshop); they were much darker, turning royal into navy blue, for example, and casting a reddish haze onto gray and black. Printing these same images directly from the Adobe software gave me results far closer to the original colors, so there must be something going on inside disclabel.

There isn't much out there to compete against this product, and I'm convinced I will be able to get this to work after much travail. I am thinking though that MacKiev's Print Shop for Macintosh might have been a wiser choice even though it costs about double what this one does.

One last thing: the software is excruciatingly slow (I'm using a 1.25 GHz G4) with large files. You'd be well-advised to select lower resolutions - thus surrendering potentially great looking CD artwork replicas - if you aren't patient with the software.