[...] OK, now for the features that I upgraded for. First is Disc Spanning. This was a feature first introduced in Toast 7. It allows you to back up large amounts of data, and Toast will automatically span multiple CDs or DVDs. Toast 7 had a limitation of only doing this for Mac-only discs. Toast 8 will span discs for both platforms. What’s great about Toast’s spanned discs, is it doesn’t just divide the files across multiple discs (like other utilities), it can actually break up a single file, and write it to multiple discs. This is great for backing up video clips, as they are often too big to fit on a single disc. It also just makes archiving a lot of data much easier, since you don’t have to break things up in small chunks. [...]

[...] There are times where you need to burn files onto more than one disc. What Disco calls “Spanex” is just that – support for burning to multiple discs. It handles burning many files onto a series of discs just fine, from what I saw. In burning a bunch of crap to a series of discs, it spread the data equally on the three discs, though it hasn’t seemed to work the same way for everyone. While Disco may or may not span your files evenly over multiple discs, it falls flat on it’s face when you try to burn a single file that’s larger than the disc size (say, a CD-R). It simply can’t do it, while Toast can. A short coming, for sure, though not essential for every Mac user. [...]

[...] The other day I reviewed the new Mac disc burning utility, Disco. To do so, I actually bought a copy of the public beta, through MacZot. I did this partially for testing, because I was hoping it was going to be a Toast killer, and also because I had received a free copy of App Zapper through MacZot a few moths back. I figured $14.95 was a small price to pay for 2 apps (and I really love App Zapper). [...]

Don’t forget that, as Richard said, Disco is still very much in development, and solutions to the issues you had with it could very well pop up in future releases. Besides, despite what its numerous taglines might indicate, I think Disco is targeted at just a slightly lower-end market than Toast anyway.

Perhaps submit these comments to the makers? They’ve made an amazing app so far, I don’t see why they won’t be able to add more functionality at the request of the user.