detail information

Positives and Negatives:

While using this program a number of points both positive and negative came up. These are listed below for easy reference.

Positives:

• Clean and attractive user interface
• Very easy to use wizards
• Very stable
• Excellent burn engine
• 'Copy On The Fly" works extremely well
• Many useful burning related features
• Affordable price $ 24.99 / € 19.99

Negatives:

• No DVD Video creation wizard (Optional pack available)
• Some very popular DVD RW drives are not fully supported
• Data creation wizard is just a bit too basic for some tasks
• No label/CD cover editor

Conclusion:

Overall this is a very impressive program. It has many features that you don't normally find with a burning program.

As shown above it passed all of the tests with flying colours. It installed and worked the first time without needing to be updated or for any technical support to be called.

The one bad point that we did come across while doing the review was the lack of support of the BenQ drive. As this is a drive manufacturer that's growing in sales and respect for making quality drives, this is an oversight in our opinion.

In addition to the BenQ drive not being supported there are also a few other drives that do not yet appear on the supported drive list yet. Some of these are the latest Samsungs, LG and Plextor drives. These may or may not work correctly with the program at this time.

Looking back at the original statement by BHA, 

The writing engine has been tuned to enable faster performance and realize more stable processing overall. The user interface had a total makeover making it easier for users to navigate the software intuitively. The Wizard makeover now allows users to view the basic B's Recorder GOLD8 functions at a glance.

We can certainly see that this has happened. The wizard interface is so easy to use that even a novice user will be able to create backups and burn files to a CD or DVD in minutes. The 'On The Fly" copying was done very quickly in under 7 minutes and with a high burn quality.

On top off all of this is the very low price of the software compared to others. In comparison it can be anywhere from 50% to 75% cheaper than its nearest rival.

To complete this review off, we submitted a few questions to the developers of the software. Below are the questions and their responses.

At present there is no support for some of the newer drives. Will this be addressed in forthcoming updates? 

We are constantly including new drives in every update. We strive to include the latest drives in these updates, but at times we cannot keep up with the number of drives being released. By including the Drive Detection function in B's Recorder GOLD, users can use the software with some limitations until the drive is officially supported and they do not have to worry about the software not supporting their new burner.

Why did you decide to include  features not normally found in burning software, such as MPEG Conversation and HD Backup? 

MPEG Conversion

BHA has developed its own MPEG2 video encoder and XVD compression software. Users needs today do not stop at burning discs, but extend into the multimedia field, so we have incorporated these technologies into the B's Recorder GOLD suite. When burning discs, especially video discs, compatibility is important to users. With the variety of video formats available compatibility can be a problem. B's Recorder GOLD originally included an MPEG Check function, but what is the use of having an incompatible file if you cannot convert it to a compatible format. So we made the MPEG Conversion function as a standard function.

HD Backup

BHA has backup software available on the Japanese market, but not in other languages. Backing up data is now an important part of everyday computing life, so we now include the hard drive and file backup as standard functions in the B's Recorder GOLD suite.

Are there any more features that you are planning to introduce in forthcoming releases? 

We are planning the release of the DVD version of B's Recorder GOLD8 in summer which will include DVD-Video, DVD-VR and DVD+VR functions, such as DVD-Video authoring, loading movies from a DV camera, a screen grab function, converting MPEG2 and XVD files, and joining movie files.

On the Data Creation wizard, there is no option to add individual files from a folder or remove unwanted files from a folder. Could this be added to the wizard to give the user more control? 

We aim satisfy users needs in our upgrades, so we have put this on the list of suggestions for improving the software and will hopefully be included in the next major upgrade.

Final Word:

There are a lot of companies making CD burning software these days. Many of them include options to do some of the features that this software can do. However compared to this software they all fall short.

Overall we both rate this software very highly. As shown in the KProbe graphs, burn quality is very high and 'On The Fly" burning was extremely quick. Couple this with the ripping and Video Disc creation system and this is one software package that scores highly. What makes it stand out above many other programs though is the inclusion of the extras that are not found with other burning software suites. Here I am talking about the file backup, hard drive backup, audio backup, MPEG conversation and of course the HighMAT facility.

The only down side is the lack of support of some of the newer drives that are currently available. Although the drives will most likely work as intended until they are officially endorsed you can't be certain.

Therefore, we can give this software the Safe Buy award from CDFreaks.

Had there been support for the latest drives currently on the market this would most likely have been the Gold award.