Authoring CD/DVDs - Ahead's Nero or Roxio's EasyDVD
Written: Jul 03 '04 (Updated Jul 06 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Expansive software suite, rock solid burning, smooth software updates, clean interface
Cons: Packet writing InCD crashes occassionally, video authoring is a bit feature poor
The Bottom Line: Nero is a complete and solid CD/DVD authoring package. Some areas need feature enhancements. Basic CD creation is very mature, easy to use and is very configurable.
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| cwkemp's Full Review: Nero OEM SUITE Latest Version CD / DVD Burning Sof... |
Likely the biggest adjustment I had when I purchased a new computer back in November was the shift from Roxio (Adaptec) Easy CD Creator to the Nero OEM Suite 6.0 which came bundled with my Pioneer DVR-106D DVD/CD Writer.
I had been an EasyCD Direct CD user for years. Direct CD is the background task packet writing program which allows you to treat a CD-R disk list a floppy or hard drive by simply dragging and dropping files via the Windows interface as you would move files around on your hard drive.
In actual fact, on my old system, I used the following features quite commonly so they will be the main focus of this review:
• CD-R as a drag drop drive for Data Archiving
• Music compilation CD creation from regular CDs
• Collection of Photos on CDs in regular windows format
I have come to trust and know the Easy CD program, even though while attempting to make sharable CR-ROMs, EasyCD somewhat frequently created pretty coasters which looked suspiciously like CD-ROMs.
So, given my wary dependence on the Easy CD Creator programs of the past (my most recent was v3.5c), I chose to take this ‘forced’ opportunity of installing the “free” Nero OEM 6.0 Suite from the DVD writer package versus going out and purchasing the upgrade from Easy CD to East DVD creator.
Installation
One drawback of some OEM software is that instruction manuals are a bit of a luxury. My particular OEM copy only comes with a bright red CD-ROM with a pleasing fire ring around the center of the CD.
“Ahhhh...” he says, CD BURNER, I get it. The flames must have burned up the paper copy of the user manual. Oh well, I decided to trudge on without any installation instructions.
Installation actually went very smoothly, the wizard proceeded with the choice to install the following software programs:
• Nero StartSmart -
• Nero Express 6
• InCD 4
• Nero Vision Express 2 SE
• Nero showtime
• Nero media player
• Nero toolkit
• Nero Cover designer
My first comment post installation was that in the Start Menu, there was now the following hierarchy...:
• Nero
==> Nero OEM [Express, Cover Designer]
==> Nero ToolKit [CD-DVD Speed, DriveSpeed, InfoTool]
==> Nero Vision Express 2 SE [Showtime, VisionExpress SE]
==> User Guides
--> NeroStartSmart
... which I am sure makes sense to some designer at Ahead Software (creators of Nero), but it seemed a bit over organized to me. However I was quite happy to see the on-line user guides for CoverDesigner, Express, VisionExpress and Showtime.
First usage - the Nero StartSmart application launch center
The start smart wizard is the one stop launcher, which is attractive and a little more graphical than I was expecting. Also they chose not to use standard windows conventions, but it does not stray too far.
From the launcher, you can chose your format (DVD or CD) and then a customized set of available options are presented to you based on the media type you've selected. I found the graphical menus quite easy to navigate and I was very happy to see the menu contained user friendly action descriptions such as Make Data Disk, Make Your Own DVD-Video, Play Audio versus the previously referenced marketing names of Nero Express, Nero Vision Express and NeroMix Play&Burn respectively.
One prominent (if not too prominent) button is the Update button which tells you that an update is available for download. (Note: I believe I have used this twice now and it is a simple and easy way to get the latest and greatest version downloaded.) The very nice feature of this update tool is that you can update the individual applications. Unfortunately it is still a manual file download and double click execution.
On to the applications...
Starting simple I decided to try throwing in an audio CD just to make sure the program & drives were working together happily (a peculiarity of my system was that my Easy CD creator could not play audio CDs in the CD-RW drive - it would only play them when it was in the regular CD-ROM drive).
NeroMix Play&Burn Ripper/Player
The application whipped up and starting playing the CD right away. Play and volume controls are easy available and I noticed right away the track ripping capability. I fooled around a bit with MP3 ripping and found the interface easy (I believe it supports ripping audio tracks to MP3, TwinVQ, WMA, and WAV formats).
Here is the first disadvantage of the OEM version - the Play Audio option which runs the NeroMix Play&Burn application was a demo version only. This application has since timed out because I found MusicMatch far more powerful for my usage pattern of creating MP3s from CDs back at the time.
The major reasons I stayed with Musicmatch Jukebox over NeroMix were:
• greater flexibility & automation of track naming for MP3s (any order of CD title/Artist/Track #)
• native support for the irock MP3 player
• NeroMix was a trial version only
So...after not such a great first application impression, the next set impressed me (and I believe it is the original Nero product - Nero Express - so this probably shouldn’t surprise me).
One for all - Nero Express - the real CD/DVD utility
I have since found that Nero Express is the heart of the suite for my usage patterns. The main activities it performs are:
• Creating Data CDs which run on all PCs
• Creating Audio CDs for playing in vanilla CD players
• Creating MP3 CDs for playing in MP3 capable CD players
• Copying a CD & Burning previously created disk images to a CD
The interface is somewhat similar to the EasyCD interface, and aside from the Copying CD window, the Data/Audio/MP3 all have the same layout and are tailored as necessary (with very minimal deltas between the three so it is definitely a common look and feel). The interfaces are in step through wizard format and are quite complete in terms of availabe options.
You have options to leave the disc open for future additions, or write in Track at Once or Disc at Once modes. The more obscure options I used occasionally from EasyCd (such as Joliet versus ISO9660 file systems) are available but a bit harder to find - they are in the Configure “Expert Features” menu.
I have only made a couple Audio CDs as I seem to be doing this less and less these days. However they have both worked and they both play in my 1991 Honda Preludes CD player which is the most finicky CD player I’ve ever found.
I have only made a copy of a music CD for travelling and I found the Nero Internet CD database worked well. But then again it was a VERY popular U2 CD I made so I would have been shocked had it not retrieved the correct song titles.
Backing up my various CD-Rs of digital photos to a DVD-R also was very smooth using the Nero Express application.
Roxio Direct CD versus Nero In CD
Instead of a CD-RW, I chose to use a Memorex DVD+RW as the drag and drop disk media. I find this a very quick way to make back-ups of hard drive directories or as a target for the various programs (such as Quicken or Address Book) that send back-ups to another drive.
A side note is that the one drawback I’ve found to moving from CD-R to DVD+RW is that DVD+RW are not the most prolific format out there, so sharing this disk is not the easiest option. But then again, this is a backup of my data so I don’t really need to share that often anyway.
I have not noticed any glitches so far with the drag and drop which is great. Anything I have retrieved or any backups I have tested for integrity have all worked perfectly. The speed of writing to disk is very quick as well, at least I have not been aware of myself impatiently waiting for the writes to finish. This is always a concern since packet writing methods for CD-RWs went through some bumpy times in the early stages of the technology.
With the size of DVD+RWs, I have even toyed with the idea of backing up my hard drive to this format. However, I decided that I would use Nero Express and a write once DVD-R if I ever get around to this action.
One option I like is the auto formatting when inserting a new CD-RW. In CD auto detects when an un-formatted CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW disk is inserted.
One issue I have found with In CD seems to be a negative interaction with the multiple users feature in Microsoft Windows XP. Sometimes when “switching users”, the In CD program will hang and bring up the “end program” dialogue. I have not found this to be an issue as after the new user is activated any dragging and dropping to the DVD+RW works fine. It seems just to be an annoyance and a delay when switching users.
Another issue is that if you have the NeroVision Express application open when you insert a packetized DVD+RW disk, there is a bug and the DVD+RW will not be presented as drag and drop capable as it should be since I believe there is a conflict for the DVD writer resource. Closing the NeroVision Express application resolves the problem and automatically brings the DVD RW root folder up onto the desktop - this took a bit of time to find however!
My biggest complaint is that In CD does not completely support the Direct CD format. What this translates to is that you *may* be able to read a disk which was created with EasyCD, but even on the Nero FAQ support site, they note you cannot write to this Direct CD format. For me, this means that the backup CDs I have from my old PC (in Direct CD format) are not usable on the new PC running Nero In CD. I had to burn regular CD-R in closed session mode to be able to transfer these disks. I chose not to reformat as who knows, the next PC may come with Easy DVD creator.
Nero Showtime
I believe windows Media Player does all (if not more) than the Nero Showtime player. I’ve played around with it, but it has not impressed me enough to switch from WMP.
Unfortunately it installed itself as the default player for a quite a few formats, so I had to go and undo those changes. It still launches when you perform the 'Play Video' option from the StartSmart launcher.
Nero VisionExpress for Video Authoring
NeroVision Express is launched from StartSmart when any of the following options are chosen:
• Make a [Video CD | Super Video CD]
• Make a [Video Slide Show | Super Video Slide Show]
• Capture Video
• Make your own DVD Video
• Make your own DVD slideshow
I’ll start with my comments on the Capture Video capability.
Capturing video from my Logitec Quickcam, ATI Rage Theatre capture or Sony Video recorder is about the same effort. Switching between sources is also very easy. I was even impressed my external microphone was chosen as the sound source without any configuration.
I did encounter a patch requirement for one of the Direct X 9 drivers which I had to update in order to use the ATI Rage Theatre capture. The really good news is Nero produced a pop-up with a direct link when I was attempting this video capture.
The captured clips can be played right from the capture window, so this is great if you are composing a quick video birthday card as you can record/review/record/burn very rapidly.
Clicking the Next button after you have captured some clips brings you to a wizard asking whether you want to capture more video, create a DVD, create a Video CD (& other formats). After choosing one, you are presented with the new NeroVision Project and timeline where you can play with the clip layout and add DVD chapters.
This is not a very fancy program, but it is effective. If you are looking for video clip transitions (fading, zooming, blanking, etc.), you’ll have to look elsewhere to one of the DVD authoring programs such as Pinnacle Studio, Sonic MyDVD.
Creating a DVD slideshow is very neat and actually quite quick. I first saw this technology when one of my friends at work presented wedding pictures on a DVD set to music.
Unlike the Capture Video wizard, you can apply effects in this slideshow wizard. It’s very trivial to put the photos together, and you can add some rudimentary transitions (basically one of four 'wipes' which make a nice transition from photo to photo). It is very quick to put together a slideshow DVD. You even do some basic manipulations to the photos as well such as rotate or use certain filters such as Emboss.
There is also audio which can be added. I found it qujtie easy to add music tracks to played while the photos zoom by the viewers. Although it is worth noting I first tried to do a voice over which explained the photos, but I did not have that much success playing around with doing the recording.
The one thing I had a tough time doing was making Chapters for the different photo sets. Essentially I had to make a bunch of individual slideshows, save them to disk and then import them into one big project. This was far more tedious than I wanted it to be, but in reality it did not turn out to be that big of a deal to have only one chapter for the slideshows I was creating.
Again, after playing with Pinnacle Studio, MyDVD, WinDVD I believe this DVD slideshow program is lagging behind a bit in the features.
Label Making
I had fun playing around with this and the results are pretty sleek sometimes. However I’m still a bit wary of CD labels in general. I have found labels to be hit or miss proposition in the canadian climate of cold winters and hot summers, since some glues cannot handle the shrinking and expanding they must endure. I have had to fish a couple CDs out of car CD players with crinkled labels and this means I am not a big user of this feature.
So what about Burning?
Nero has been very sound in this area. I have yet to create a coaster of either DVD or CD format (other than for improper data selection on my part, but the disk still works fine).
I have not experienced any buffer under-flows nor crashes while burning, and the program seems to make effective use my Pioneer drive’s speed.
I know Nero has the same limitation as Easy CD in that it will not successfully copy all types of CDs/DVDs due to copy protection (which frustrates a lot of newbie users). Other pure CD/DVD bit copiers still have a place in the world for certain.
The fact that this section is so small is kudos to Ahead Software’s Nero. This is probably the most important section and it meets my expectations very acceptably.
Overall
I am content with the Nero OEM Suite 6.0, although I can see a lot of area for improvement in the feature richness of the NeroVision application (which is essentially the video authoring package).
Nero certainly has performed well in all the burning activities. I find the In CD packet writing application acceptable (other that the lack of the competitor’s Direct CD support), but then it hasn’t really offered anything above and beyond the EasyCD Direct CD application either.
Would I trade it for Easy CD/DVD Creator? I can’t say that I would rule out a move back to Easy DVD Creator. The choice would probably depend on feature richness at this point. I do not believe I would go out and buy an Easy DVD Creator suite to replace Nero, but I may make my next DVD/CD writer drive purchase based on the bundled OEM software.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
cwkemp
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Member: Colin Kemp
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Reviews written: 26
Trusted by: 21 members
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