Although most CD recording drives – or new PCs that include CD recorders – come with a basic CD mastering program, advanced users will usually hit a brick wall at some point when trying to do something out of the ordinary. That's when the time comes to look for a better CD application, and there are quite a few around, some designed for home and business users, while others are freeware or shareware aimed at the geeks among us. One that straddles the two categories is Nero Burning ROM, from Ahead Software in Germany; while it's a commercial program and is designed to be used by normal people who simply want to get the job done, Nero has gained a following among the CD-R cognoscenti for its range of advanced features. Best of all, it's priced a lot lower than some of its competitors.

One of the two basic CD-R tasks for most people is to make a CD-ROM with one or more files, and Nero does this as well as any program I've seen. You just specify the disc format, date setting and other options – or just use Nero's wizard to set everything for you – and then drag and drop files (either from a window within Nero or from Windows Explorer) to create the desired layout. (Nero even has a virus scanner to check each selected file before burning the disc.) Once your layout is done you're ready to burn the disc, and here Nero does a better than average job of showing you the progress of the job. When the disc is complete you're offered the opportunity to create a label for your disc – Nero includes a CD label creator program, and if you buy the boxed version a label applicator and some starter labels are included.

The other "big thing" is CD audio mastering, and Nero really shines here. As with some other programs you can make audio CDs from tracks of existing discs or WAV audio files, but with Nero you can also take files in MP3 or Windows Media Audio format, which will be decoded automatically. You can select several processing options for each song (such as noise reduction, click reduction or stereo synthesis), and a basic editor is available to let you edit audio files. You can even set index marks within a track, though very few current players support this feature. Nero will download song titles for existing CDs from an online database, and – if your drive supports the new CD TEXT system – it will write song titles that can be read by a CD TEXT-capable player. As with most CD mastering programs, audio CDs can be written on the cheap and plentiful data CDs; some bundled mastering programs would only record audio on special (and more expensive) consumer audio discs, so upgrading to Nero is a good way to get around that problem.

Something that has gotten attention in recent years is the Video CD, and Nero provides advanced capabilities in that area. A Video CD is a CD that contains up to 80 minutes of video at a fairly modest resolution, and the beauty of it is that VCDs will play in many DVD players but can be made with a normal CD recording drive and on standard blank CDs.  (Some DVD players will play CD-R discs; many that won't will play CD-RW discs, though some players will only play certain brands.) VCDs use MPEG-1 encoded video files, but Nero can encode this for you from files encoded in AVI, Windows Media Video, ASF or older versions of QuickTime (though not QuickTime 5). You can also add still pictures to the disc, and even create slide shows. And Nero also supports the Super Video CD format which provides higher resolution with a 40-minute limit, though since this uses MPEG-2 you need to either already have your files in the right format or else get Ahead's MPEG-2 encoder plugin.

Nero has a range of other capabilities, such as an advanced CD copy utility that can often succeed where other copiers fail. A wide range of CD formats is also available, such as bootable CDs and CD EXTRA (audio and data on the same disc). Nero can even record in the HFS format used on Macintosh systems, though to do this you have to create the disc layout on a Mac, copy it to a removable SCSI drive, and then connect that drive to your PC. And with the advent of moderately priced DVD recording drives (even in new high-end consumer PCs), Nero has added support for several DVD-ROM formats, though for DVD Video Ahead now has a different application, NeroVision Express (which also does Video CD). And you can even burn two CDs on two drives simultaneously, and that feature can be expanded to as many as 32 drives for an additional fee if you have a need to manufacture small volumes of discs.

I mentioned earlier that Nero Burning Rom has a very attractive price. If you download it from their Web site, the registration fee is just $49. The boxed version (with the CD label applicator and printed manual) is $69 plus $9 shipping. There's also an MP3 encoder option, which is needed if you want to compile MP3 CDs and don't already have an encoder in some other application. At these prices, Nero Burning Rom is awfully hard to beat.

http://www.ahead.de/en/index.html#root

—   Ed Ellers