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Audio CDs Made Easy

The online music revolution hasn't escaped Adaptec's attention: Easy CD Creator 4.0 lets you drag MP3 files directly into a CD layout and then converts them to the proper format as they're written to CD. To help you purchase and preview music securely from the Internet, the program ships with Liquid Audio's 4.0 player.

The program also supports CDDB Internet music database: When you load an audio CD, Easy CD Creator automatically searches CDDB to gather song titles and album information, which spares you the drudgery of entering it yourself. This is a great time saver when creating duplicates or compilations of your music CDs.

Adaptec includes a new stand-alone program called CD Spinner for audio CD creation. Although Easy CD Creator itself can handle most jobs, CD Spinner provides more control over file conversion as well as one-button access to Jewel Case Creator and a bundled sound editor that offers basic effects processing and cut-and-paste editing of WAV files.

Once the CD has been burned, the Jewel Case Creator app helps design and print the paper inserts for CD jewel cases. This new stand-alone program offers a host of fresh editing functions plus support for color printers and CD labels. The program has some minor bugs, such as letting text and bitmaps spill over dialog-box borders--but overall it does a good job.

Get the Picture

For creating image-oriented CDs, version 4.0 includes PhotoRelay--a handy little program that lets you drag and drop or scan in photos to create slide shows, albums of thumbnail images that display in a Web browser, or "video postcards." Easy CD 4.0 also includes MGI's PhotoSuite II SE and VideoWave II SE for image manipulation. Video CD support in the new version lets you string together multiple low-resolution MPEG files for playback. Creating Video CDs is a snap, although the Add File dialog won't let you add more than one file at a time.

Adaptec also includes its Take Two disaster-recovery utility. This program may not be as much fun as some of the other offerings, but it could save you in an emergency. It works with the company's DirectCD 2.5 packet-writing software--which is now also bundled with Easy CD Creator--to create images of your hard drive on CD-RW. Take Two allows you to span drive images over multiple discs, restore individual files, and create an emergency floppy in case of an operating system corruption or a hard drive crash.

The long list of new features and improvements makes Easy CD Creator a worthy choice for almost any CD-burning task. At $99, the program isn't exactly an impulse buy, but the price shouldn't faze first-time buyers. Adaptec offers a $20 rebate to make the leap more appealing for upgraders and owners of competing packages.