Developer Verrocchio Maldini has released the first beta of a new Mac OS X application, FireStarter FX which makes backups of your CDs and DVDs for burning them back to another media.
“It also provides an easy way of burning disc images from the PC world,” Maldini said. “It handles perfectly well cue/bin files, which are so common on Windows, and which were very hard to burn with other tools. Plus, it’s a very easy way to erase an RW media, without the hassle of Disk Utility.”
Built using Mac OS X’s Cocoa application framework, FireStarter FX is based on the open source cdrdao project. FireStarter FX lets users burn complex CD formats such as VCDs and SVCDs. Its features include: simulation, a customizable RAM cache, high speed burning, buffer under-run technology, multi-session burning, paranoia audio-CD ripping (for error protection copies), CDDB access to automatically create CD-TEXT data, and CD-TEXT reading and writing with drives that support it.
FireStarter FX also lets users try “overburning,” a CD-R burning technique that enables users to write more data to the disc than the official capacity allows by using the “leadout” area at the end of the disc. It’s a technique that has grown in popularity in the Windows camp, but has been overlooked or bypassed by Mac CD-R software developers.
Maldini is careful to caution users that despite FireStarter FX’s ability to archive CDs and data DVDs, it’s not a DVD-Video backup application — the software lacks any video transcoding or encoding tools that would make such a feat possible.
Maldini is offering this beta version of public consumption to help improve FireStarter FX. He hopes to squash any open bugs, and admits that not all features are active yet. He also wants to localize the software in other languages, and welcomes feedback. Visit the Web site for more details.