detail information

Applications:

Now let's take a look at the rest of the applications that come with this package.

Disc Copier

This is a straight forward copy of one Audio CD to a blank CD. By clicking on this option on the window you will get the following screen come up.

As you can see it is a standard reminder about copyrights. By putting a cross in the box it will not popup each time. So now let's move onto the program itself.

The first window you will see will look like the one below. This is the Disc Copying 'Simple" view.

As you can see in this view you only have the two drives to do a On-The-Fly copy and the burn button which at present is shaded out because of the lack of source and destination discs in the drive.

By clicking on the 'Advanced" button you will get a window which looks like the following.

As you can see you have a few more options available to you to play with. You can now burn to and from an image along with options of burn speed, buffer underrun protection, number of copies plus the ability to make more than one copy.

When we place an Audio CD and some blank media into the drives we see some more information appear along with another option for the read speed.

Once you are happy with the settings the last thing to do is press the Copy button which is now available to you. This will bring up the following window.

As you can see here the Average Write Speed is still showing 0.0x here and continues to do so until the Disc Progress meter goes over about 50% completion.

As you can see here the disc has now been burnt and the Average Write Speed now shows a figure. The one bad thing I can see here is that nothing happened once the disc was burnt. No window popping up saying done, or the drive opening indicating it had finished. Only the bottom buttoned changed from Cancel to Close which if your not paying attention can be easily missed.

Now we move onto creating a data disc. Once again the same program is used but as you can see the Drive now specifics XP2_PRO_ENG as the disc title instead of Audio CD.

Once again the program worked fine. The disc was copied perfectly.

Finally we move onto DVD copying. Here the Disc is being copied is called CDS_TEST_B2. This is a test DVD.

The copy process supports both Single Layer and +R Double Layer media mounted in the destination drive.

The whole process took 16:58 to complete. The resulting disc was read back in several drives, and none of the drives had any problems in reading the disc.

Creator Classic

This section was covered above. You can see it under Audio then Copy Tracks From Audio CD, Create New Audio CD, Create New MP3 Disc, Data then Copy Files To Disc and finally under DVD then Create New DVD.

Because each is slightly different in the way it is used along with the appearance of the screens, it is better to separate them out so that all of the options are seen and clearly shown.

Photo Suite

This program was covered above in the Video Section.

DVD Builder

Now let's take a look at the DVD Builder application.

The DVD builder application is used to author your completed video files, either done with Videowave 7 or some other application.

The first screen you are presented with is the 'choose Project Type". As we can see from the screenshot below, DVD, VCD, SVCD and DVD on CD types are all supported.

Once the project type has been selected the main application screen will open.

We are now ready to pick a theme for our finished DVD-Video and add our video clips. This once again is a very simple task. Pressing the 'add new title" option will open a file selector and allow you to select the clip or clips to be added. You add as many as they media will allow or as few as you wish. Double Layer media is also supported, so quite a few video clips can be added, depending on their size of course.

Now we are ready to burn our compilation onto a DVD media. All that is required to start this process is one click of the mouse on the 'burn button".

Once this has been done the burn screen is displayed with the various options available.

As we can see from the screenshot above, we can select our burn drive and choose the video quality settings and sound settings all from this one dialog. There is also an option to 'fit the project to a disc". I can imagine this being very useful if you have added perhaps a little too much video data to your project.

At this time the compilation will be built into a DVD-Video compliant file on your hard drive and then burned onto your DVD media.

The DVD Builder application, performed flawlessly. The resulting disc was checked in my set top player and played from start to finish without any issues.

DVD Builder is also a powerful Video creation and authoring tool. If you know what you are doing, it's very simple to capture, edit, add effects, author and burn your DVD-Video all from this one application. I (Dee) was very impressed with this application.

VideoWave

This section was covered above under Video then Edit Video.

Drag-To-Disc

Drag to disc is a burn on the fly program that allows you to drag files into the application which will then burn them to a disc.

By clicking and dragging any files you want burnt to your media into the CD picture on the program to start the copying procedure.

If you have no disc in the drive you will be prompted to insert one.

At this point everything seemed to be going well. The files had been dragged to the disc and the CD picture had begun to spin meaning that the files were being copied and the disc was being burnt.

However at this point my computer (Womble) locked up. I had to perform a hard reboot on the system to get it going again. Unperturbed I tried again. This time the burning went on a bit longer and got to about 75% before once again locking the entire computer up.

My PC (Dee-27) managed to complete this task without any problems.

Unfortunately at this point we haven't been able to determine why one PC was able to complete the task and the other one failed.

BackUp My PC

Here we will go through the Backup Wizard.

The following window will come up giving you the option of backing up an entire drive or selected files and folders. Here I have decided to go for selected files and folders.

As you can see here I have selected a number of files on my D Drive to be backed up. In fact the total files on the drive come to about 690mb so in this instance I could have selected the drive backup option instead.

One of the backup options is the ability to either backup all of your files or just the ones that have been changed since the last backup. This option is called an incremental backup. This option will greatly reduce the space needed to backup the files but will more laborious if you have to restore the files back again.

The next screen allows you to either backup to a file or to a burner. For the purpose of these tests we will select the burner.

The last option screen allows you to perform a check on the disc once the data has been backed up to make sure it is all correct and no errors are present. There is also an option to compress the data to save space.

Here you can schedule the backup to be run at another time. This is useful if you want to do it late at night when all changes to files have been completed and there is no one accessing the data.

The last screen will ask you for a name for the backup. This and the options will be saved do that next time you can just select the backup job to save time.

The first job is to compile all of the files on your computer and to get access to any that are currently open.

Here we can see the application backing up the data. It gives you an estimate of the size of the backup and time remaining. As you can see it is about just over 50% done. At the end of the backup it came in at the exact estimated size that you can see. This is very good as most keep on adjusting themselves right up until the process is complete.

The second stage here is the verification process. This makes sure all of the data is correct on the disc.

The last thing that it does is to give you a report on the job. This lets you know what happened.

Now we move onto the restore stage. When you put the disc into the drive it will find and load the settings from it. All you have to do is to tick the box to say that you want to restore to this location.

That's it. Once you have clicked the Start button the process will start and restore your data back again.

Although this program is very good and useful it does feel as though it was been tacked on to the rest of the suite. As you can see the layout or appearance of it doesn't match the rest of the applications with their shinny new silver interface. Although this doesn't really make any difference it would have been nice to have the same looking interface as the rest of the applications.

Finally we take a look at the Tools

DVD

Tools