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Better Burning

A CD-RW drive is only as good as its software. We take five feature-rich mastering packages for a spin.

By Melissa J. Perenson, PCW Print   

Complete Coverage

Ahead Nero Burning ROM 5.5

What's Hot: The strangely named Nero Burning ROM 5.5 offers a vast number of options, all of which the well-written help file covers. For example, the program enables you to write to hybrid CDs and to Macintosh-compatible HFS CDs, and it has an integrated MPEG-1 encoder for creating Video CDs. Other features include Nero Imagedrive, which creates a virtual CD-ROM drive that lets you view the contents of an image file without having to burn the image to disc.

What's Not: The wizard that takes you through the burning process points you in the right direction but still leaves you mostly on your own in a sea of bewildering options. Between the complex interface and the project wizard, you frequently end up clicking through numerous screens to do tasks that other programs let you do in one or two screens.

What Else: Nero Burning ROM 5.5 comes with an MP3 encoder, but it will encode only 30 files in total. To do more, you have to buy the full version of the encoder, which costs $15 extra.

Upshot: Users who want flexibility and don't mind a challenging learning curve will get the most out of this program.

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