Burn it up!!! (Nero Burning ROM 5.x in general)

Member Name: pipefish

Product:	Nero Burning ROM 5.x in general
Date:	18/07/03 (980 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Very Easily to Use, Versatile

Disadvantages: May need to experiment with writing speeds if using lower quality CDs, OEM versions lock out other CD writers

Burn it up!

I have used Nero for several years now, finding it the most easy and fast software to use for CD writing. As I make a lot of CDs the ease of using the software is important and not being very technically minded towards CDs I understand very little about transfer rates, buffer sizes and caches, much less what settings to put them at.
Luckily Nero is very quick to set up and get into using - there are lots of pictures, diagrams and instructions to guide you through writing or burning your CDs and making it as painless as possible without requiring you to have written a thesis on IDE transfer channels, laser technology or recorded media standards to know how to use it.
I have used it on Windows 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP without problems or the dreaded Buffer Under-runs that you seem to get with other CD writing software halfway through a disk.

One advantage of Nero Burning ROM is the disk space used - it is a much smaller program than Easy CD Creator and seems to take less system resources. It needs just over 30Mb to run when installed with all the extras.

Nero is very simple to use. When starting, you are presented with a set of menus with clear options and pictures on them asking you whether you want to create a new CD or copy a CD. It then asks what type of CD you want to create - whether it is a music CD or data CD or other type (VCD, mixed CD etc). It then asks if it is a new CD or whether you are continuing with a CD (multi-session CD) and adding files to it. On selecting these you are presented with two window panes - one shows what is going onto the CD and the other shows your hard disk. You then drag and drop files onto the CD pane and click on the Burn icon and away you go.
This Wizard mode is so well set out that it is all you will probably need for writing CDs of various sorts and there is no need to go any further into the options - just a few clicks will be all that is needed most of the time. However if you
want you can do away with the menus (Wizard) and simply select from many options of new compilation you want to make: these are CD Rom ISO, audio CD, Mixed Mode CD, CD Extra, CD Copy, Video CD (VCD), Super Video CD, Boot CD-Rom, Hybrid or UDF format or to burn an Image (iso, bin, cue, nrg etc).

The audio CD is used to create CDs that will play on your hifi or CD player. Simply drag on MP3s or other music files and it creates the CD for you. You can easily alter the track lists and names or change the gaps between tracks. There are also a raft of other options for you to create splits in the tracks, add filters to mix and crossfade, add echo or remove hiss from them and an audio editor to alter peaks of the music (shown as a volume dB oscilloscope output for each track) to normalise the volume (useful for compilation CDs to make the tracks all the same volume).

The data CD is used for backups, backups ;-) and videos. Again simply drag the files onto your new CD pane and click the burn icon. A bar along the bottom of the screen indicates how much room is available on the CD. After clicking on Burn you are asked what speed you want to write at and then the process starts.

There are also various options to test the speeds of your CD drives, alter cache settings and buffer sizes and whether to use FreeDb on the internet to automatically receive song titles for your tracks when buring a CD. You also get a CD label and inlay card cover designer, wave editor and Quick Start manual.

One of the best features is the ability to back up entire partitions as a Hard Disk Backup. If you are then adding a new hard disk or reformatting a disk you can then quickly re-image the drive and instantly add Windows, your programs, all your settings, documents and data back.
This utility comes into its own when problems with Windows occur. I have found that Windows usually ends up falling over after a year or two of usage or becomes so slow at startup i
t needs a spring clean to get going again. To digress for a minute this is usually down to the Windows registry.
Generally as you install or re-install software the Windows Registry gets bigger and more bloated. The Registry is generally a large 'book' of settings, links and values for mainly profiles, programs and drivers that Windows reads every time it starts and runs. Over time as you install or uninstall software and drivers it gets more entries in it, usually because it fails to completely remove links when software is uninstalled or adds in more as more software is installed. Windows gets progressively slower due to this or may even not run properly if the registry gets corrupted. The only option here - save trying to fix the registry or reinstall Windows over itself to paper over the cracks - is to wipe the hard disk or partition that Windows is on, reinstall Windows and all your software and drivers and you should then be back to the fast system you had that started quickly (and usually pray that you were wise enough to back up all your documents and data or move it onto another partition beforehand).
However if you make a copy of the partition or image when your system is running well you can reformat the hard disk and use this to restore the entire partition without having to go through reinstalling Windows, your software, drivers, email settings and so on (which can take up to 4 hours). Computer retailers and maintainers re-image drives to quickly set up lots of computers with all the software and operating systems on them. It will have backed up all your documents and data on the partition too, so these will be restored too, plus you will get your good fast operating system back.
The backup hard disk option on Nero is easily to use, and the Help section gives lots of useful advice on how to use it. The partition is usually spanned over several CDs when you back it up, with Nero prompting you when to insert the next CD and continuing
with the backup. The backup can then be restored from DOS mode or from a Windows boot disk or CD.


After using Nero for a bit these are some tips that I have found useful:

Make sure that you finalise your CDs if you are not going to add other files to them or are giving them to other people. Sometimes CDs will not work on other computers if they have not been 'closed' first.

Nero can usually squeeze a large file onto a CD even if if is right up to its capacity, although it may be forced to finalise the CD to be able to write all of it onto one CD.

If you are using cheap CDs you may not be able to write on them at such a fast speed and they may only be able to cope at a slower writing speed such as 20x. Try dropping the speed down to avoid disk writing errors. Similarly videos can often generate errors when burning onto CD at high speed so burn them as slow as you can go at (even down to 4x or 8x). If there is an error 'data error (cyclic redundancy check)' when accessing or playing files from a CD this is because there is a problem with reading the data written on the CD - usually because it was burned too quickly.

One problem I found with Nero was that I had one CD rewriter already when I bought another which was bundled with an OEM copy of Nero. On installing this I found that I could no longer use the older CD burner any more to write to it.
A lot of versions of Nero are shipped as OEM copies with new CD burners or drives. These are generally locked so that you can only use Nero with the new drive and not any existing drives. Look in the Nero Help section on how to get your Nero serial number and visit their website (www.ahead.de) for instructions on how to unlock the product or upgrade it so that it works on all your disks. There is a good article in PC Answers August 2003 about this.

As mentioned Ahead have an excellent website with lots of information, FAQs and support articles about
Nero and upgrades and drivers and utilities to download - most for free.

Overall an excellent product well worth the price, the best CD writing software around with the worst name-pun, and king (or should that be emperor?) of CD writing.

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