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4
The
best CD burning software for you?
Tech Lab Staff Review,
September 24, 2002
Nero Max for Macintosh OS 9.x (for our European readers)
This is not meant to be a review, as Nero Max is not available in North America, but the folks at Ahead Software asked if we would like to look at their Macintosh CD creation product.
Nero Max is only available in its European market for Macintosh OS 9.x and only as an OEM distribution with CDRW drives. We spoke with the product manager for Nero Max, who said he could not comment on when or if an OS X version will be available.
Nero Max is similar to Nero 5, but with fewer features as you might expect from an OEM product. Installation is a bit cumbersome and Nero Max did not recognize all the drives it had access to, including the ComboDrive in the new Mac G4 800 Titanium. To be fair, literature on the Nero Max CD indicates which CD drives it can read is limited.
The
Bottom Line:
We would like to encourage Ahead to continue development of Nero Max,
to give it all the features of Nero 5 Burning CD, design a more Macintosh
Aqua GUI interface and Carbonize it so that it will run under OS X and
OS 9.2 Classic.
The more legitimate contenders and competition in the Mac CD creation market, the better for all of the Mac users.
Apple Computer - iTunes 3.0, iMovie 2.1.2 and iPhoto 1.1.1 for Mac OS X
Apple’s triad of media applications that allows you to print, convert to HTML, upload, mix, sort, make movies, download to an iPod, etc. etc., plus burn to a CD ROM or DVD. It’s quite an amazing collection of features and capabilities to get totally for FREE! Well that is that you have to buy a Mac or a copy of Mac OS X operation system.
These three wonderful applications have come as a standard package since the “DV iMacs” and are on every Mac you buy from
the cheapest to the
most expensive. There are no comparable applications that come from Microsoft
free or otherwise in Windows XP for PC computers.
iTunes 3.0 makes ripping, mixing a playlist and exporting to an iPod or Burning it to a Music CD painfully simple. While iTunes does have a very nice equalizer built-in there are no editing functions available, something Apple needs to add! We ripped 16 songs, mixed a playlist and burned a music CD in just 25 minutes.
iPhoto 1.1.1 is a dream for the photo organizer and archivist. It pops up automatically when you plug in your digital camera and will walk you through the image down load. Image editing is again limited to Contrast, Brightness, Red-Eye removal, Convert to Black/White and cropping any image. You can also rotate the orientation of the image.
You can then organize, arrange, create a book to have printed via online, create a slide show, screen saver or create an iMovie, all of which you can then burn right from the application to a CD or DVD.
iMovie is just phenomenal, especially considering that it’s a free bundled application. While it is no Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier, it does do what the other movie burning apps don’t do and that is create high quality movies and then burn them to CD or DVD so simply that anyone can do it.
· Capture,
edit, and combine videos with drag-and-drop ease.
· Enhance your home movies with transitions,
titles, and credits.
· Record and add musical scores, voice- overs,
and sound effects.
· Publish your finished movies to the web or save
them to videotape
· Export movies to the iDVD-ready format.
The
Bottom Line:
How can you complain about something that’s free? But really, this
is a very well done software package that will satisfy a large segment
of users and all it really needs is a really good audio editing component.
Retail Price: Bundled with
purchase of Mac OS X or preinstalled on all Macs.
Tech Lab rating 3 thumbs up*.
We love it, great reason to “switch” to a Mac.
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