I've been recently burning a bunch of discs, trying to clean out the old video dreck from my media RAID drive and free up some space. For this mission, I've been very interested in using MC's built-in Label Printing Wizard to assist me in labeling the discs. Unfortunately, the experience has been less than ideal, and almost unusable...
First off, to explain some details:
I have a
Primera BravoII CD Duplicator. This cool (but tempermental sometimes) device has the ability to print directly onto inkjet-printable discs. It shows up in Windows just like a regular old printer, and has a fairly normal print driver. I'm able to print directly to it using any layout or design program I've tried (Freehand, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc) without issue, and even with much less adept programs (Word, MS Paint, Notepad, PowerPoint, etc). All you do is set your page size to 120mm x 120mm square, and print. The driver automatically crops off any portion of the image that doesn't "fit" (the hub of the CD or the outside edge of the disc). The driver provides the proper page size(s) in it's Paper Size section, and most applications "just work".
I have a few issues with MC's label printing wizard. First off, I can't directly print to my disc publisher. I'm not sure why, but no matter what I do, MC "prints" a completely blank disc. This applies when I "actually" print the disc, and when I hit the Preview button as well.
I suspect that this has to do with the Media options in the Wizard. I'm not positive about this of course, but I'm guessing that these options (see pic below) override the selected Paper Size selected in the print driver. Therefore, since it is trying to "print" a 8.5 x 11" piece of paper to my printer, it crops it at the top and ends up blank. Again, this is just a guess, but it seems to make rational sense.
So, in order to use the CD Label Wizard with my disc publisher, I need to print to PDF first, then open the resulting PDF in Acrobat, crop it to the proper 120mm x 120mm size, then print to the publisher via Acrobat. Unfortunately, that ridiculous hoop-jumping doesn't even solve all my problems....
My other big problem is related to the limitations of the design of the disc label. I use "hub printable" inkjet discs for basically all of my burning tasks. These discs are nice because the printable surface of the disc goes all the way to the center hub. There's no large plastic ring in the middle, and it lets you print almost all the way to the center.
Again, this is something that is handled completely by my printer driver. The application you're printing from doesn't have to know or care about this setup. In the print driver, you can define the inner and outer dimensions of the discs you're printing to, and it handles the appropriate cropping.
But, MC's label printing wizard does not allow you to eliminate or modify the width of the center ring of the "donut" even in the "advanced" label editor. Even cheap CD labeling apps (SureThing and similar apps) typically allow this, and it means that my discs (if I jump through the above hoops to get them to print at all) print with a large white ring in the middle, blocking even my background image.