The
best CD burning software for you?
Tech Lab Staff, written by Zak Bryce, K.B. and S.C.
September 24, 2002
Few computer manias have captured the imaginations of Mac and PC users more than creating something and “burning” it to a CD ROM. Whether it be a photo album, music mix, instructional material, your bands latest recordings, marketing promo, vacation adventure movies, a new software application or just your favorite clip art collection.
You are creating material on CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW. Moreover, along with this evolution of CD media types and the “burner drives” themselves, the software to burn the CD’s has evolved dramatically.
There are two categories of CD creation software; the basic stripped down OEM burner applications that many computer companies bundle into a desktop or notebook computer. Some of these are quite good, but most are horrible. Then there are the retail burner applications from a variety of companies that you go to the store and buy.
We are going to focus in this review on the applications that you would buy retail, although some very good computer or
CD-RW device manufacturers
may have included a full, “lite” or trial version of one of
these applications. The one exception to this is that we will discuss
Apple’s Triad bundle of iTunes - iMovie – iPhoto, all of which
allow you to burn your creations to CD or DVD depending on which drive
is in your Mac.
ìIt's
very likely that you got a copy of Easy CD Creator Lite of some version
in a CD ROM burner...
. î
Roxio
Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum for
Windows 98SE – XP
Easy CD Creator has
been around for a long time, originally under the Adaptec banner until
Roxio was created and
spun off on its own. I can remember using Easy CD Creator 2, or was it
3 about five years ago on my first 2 x CD-R (I don’t even want to
remember what I paid for that burner).
It's very likely that you got a copy of Easy CD Creator Lite of some version in a CD ROM burner you’ve bought in the last five years. It has certainly been a popular bundled application that has lead a lot of “Lite” users to upgrade to a full version. As Roxio, Easy CD Creator has blossomed into a first class application. This new full version of ECDC Platinum is now fully Windows XP compatible and is overflowing with great features.
The first thing that you see is a graphically attractive GUI that’s easy to decipher exactly what you want to accomplish and how to go about it. At the core of Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum, it burns CDs simply. You are shown four avenues of selection; Make a Music CD, which includes MP3 and WMA files; Make a Data CD, which provides for “direct CD”, data CD project and data DVD project with 4.7GB of storage; make a Photo or Video CD which gives you the creative avenue to a Photo Album, Video Postcard, Video Impression and Video CD; and last a simple single click CD Copier to clone you favorite.
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