News :: 15MR: Audio CD Burner v4.0.0.0

Hello all and welcome to another 15-minute review! Today’s application is Audio CD Burner v4.0.0.0 by Abyss Media Company—An audio-burning software package

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Using Audio CD Burner you can create your own custom music CDs that can be played in any standard home or car stereo. With Audio CD Burner, you can choose to burn 74 or 80-minute audio CDs on either 74 or 80-minute CD-R/RW discs. Just drag and drop the songs you want onto the main screen, hit the record button, and in a short time you will have a custom CD!

Audio CD Burner work with most popular audio formats: MPEG Layer 3 (MP3), Windows Media 9 (WMA), Ogg Vorbis (OGG) and WAV. There is no need to convert to WAV! Your CD is burned directly saving your hard drive space. Audio CD Burner supports majority of IDE CD-RW drives assembled in 2001 year or later, if its burn speed is more than 8x.”

Quick Pros

• Clean interface
• Audio quality fine
• Straight forward use including drag-and-drop
• Burn speed where it should be

Quick Cons

• Says invalid file when you try to add files with non-English characters in them
• Slow to add songs
• No control over volume information at all
• Wouldn’t let be burn the disc unless the compilation was roughly under 45-50 minutes

Expansion

Audio CD Burner was surprisingly a clean and simple interface; I’ve been using the likes of Nero and freeware alternatives for quite some time, and while they do the job, sometimes they are too cluttered just to do a quick task. The audio quality comes out sounding fine as well and the burn speed is surprisingly quick.

Unfortunately, my experience wasn’t all grand. It wouldn’t accept any symbols that weren’t standard ascii, apparently, including the stylized apostrophes, letters with accent marks and more. I had to edit the file names, removing all the symbols to add them to the recording list. When adding songs as well, it is a slow process; I’m not sure if the application is verifying it is a valid music file or what, but to add a full CD full of songs, takes upwards of a minute to add.

Also, with no control over volume information such as disc name or the adding or file information into the CD-Text format, it is really for those who wish to toss together a quick disk for on the road and don’t really want much more than that. Top this off, and this application for some reason will not record a disc with more than 45-50 minutes of music; It just keeps coming back with an error of ‘Total file(s) size too big for burning on this disc!’

Final Verdict

While I do feel that there is a market for a pay-for simplified audio CD burning software which is built for people who are not familiar with CD burning, it would have to be top-notch and bugless. Some people just want to get away from Nero, or didn’t have it bundled with their system or drive and find the freeware alternatives are a little too complex for them. Unfortunately, with the issues I had as noted above which defeat the purpose of ‘simplicity’ – Many people would have thought their music file was bungled and not even thought that it was something as simple as the file name or thought a CD was supposed to hold much more than 45 minutes of music. For now, I would recommend steering clear of this application, even while free, due to the two major bugs noted. If they clean it up, it may be worth the $29.95 to someone who wants a clean interface with simplistic use; As for now, I would recommend sticking it out with the software bundled with your drive or finding a nice freeware alternative.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, March 09, 2007