detail information

Music:

The first section we are going to tackle is Audio.

Copy Audio CD

As the Copy Audio CD button brings up the Disc Copier program as does the Copy Data Disc and Copy DVD, these will be combined and reviewed together in the Applications section under Disc Copier.

Copy Tracks From Audio CD

Now let's try out the Copy Tracks program.

Clicking on this option brings up the Creator Classic window. Many options from the main window are shortcuts to other programs with predefined settings already in place. Here we see that the Audio CD Project has been set as the default project.

By clicking on the Audio CD in the Source box a list of tracks will appear. You then simply click the ones that you want to rip from the CD and click the Copy Tracks From Audio CD button.

The following window will appear giving you the options for your ripped files. There are a number of formats that you can use including Ogg and various MP3 types. Unfortunately LAME, my personal favourite was not among them. You can also choose where you want to place your files and the file naming structure.

Here I found another small problem. I typed in my Copy To location hoping that the program would create it for me. Unfortunately it wouldn't. I had to jump out of the program and create it manually before I could continue.

As you can see here the tracks are being copied across from the CD to the hard disk. It took an average of 3 minutes per track to copy and compress.

Once done I checked the files to see if they played correctly and to see if the information about the song had also been stored. As we can see it was all present and correct.

Create New Audio CD

Now we plan to create an Audio CD. As you can see it opens up Classic Creator with the Audio CD Project selected.

Here I have selected a number of Audio tracks from a CD in the DVD Rom drive along with a number of MP3's stored on the computer.

By clicking the yellow and blue box you can change the Audio Transition of the tracks on the CD. You can fade in and out of tracks and even blend the beginning and end of them together. This is a nice touch of you are trying to create a mix CD that just keeps on going.

The button next to the Audio Transition on is the Project Properties one. Here you can change several things regarding the disc properties, UPC Code and CD-Text.

Once done and by clicking on the Burn button you will bring up the following window. This is the simple view suitable for most. By clicking on the Details button you will get one or two more options.

As you can see you can now select the burner, Disc Image, Burn Speed and other similar options.

Once you are happy you can hit the burn button to actually start the burning process.

As you can see this time, the Average Write Speed is now displayed at a lower percentage and the drive ejected itself when finished.

The Audio CD played perfectly and there was no noticeable difference between the tracks copied from the CD to the MP3's stored on the hard drive.

Create MP3 Disc

Now we move onto creating an MP3 CD.

Once again this opens up Classic Creator, but this time with the MP3 Project selected.

The first thing I tried was to add some tracks from the Audio CD into the MP3 Project. Unfortunately the program wouldn't allow this. It seems you can only add pre made tracks and not do it on the fly.

Instead I filled the CD up with ready made MP3's until there was only 288kb worth of space left. Here I wanted to see if the program would burn a CD with this much on it.

Once again I clicked the Project Properties button and had a look though. This time there was an Advanced tab which I took a look at. Here as you can see you can add your own details to the CD.

Now it was time to burn the CD. After pushing the burn button the following window came up. As you can see it was trying to be helpful. The program knew the amount of space left on the disc wouldn't be able to anything else on there once you added in the lead in and lead out parts to the disc.

Once again the burn window. On this burn the speed managed to reach 48x which was as fast as the media could handle. This was the first time it had done so. Getting up to this speed took until 95% of the disc was filled.

After the burn had completed the MP3 CD played flawlessly. There was a difference in quality of the songs but after reviewing the originals this was down to the mixed bitrate they had been created in.

Convert LP Or Tapes To CD

Now we move onto the Convert program. This can be used to convert LP, Tapes or other analogue inputs into wav or MP3 files.

The first screen up looks like the one below. This first thing I did was to press the Recording setup button on the left.

This brings up a nice run through of how you can setup your device to get them hocked up to your system. Very nice touch this is for the beginners. Once you have everything hocked up you need to press the Record Tracks button on the first screen to continue.

As you can see I have had to use my headset as my input source here as I didn't have a stereo hanging around to test this out with. I will use the microphone to record some noise off of the TV and to speak into the microphone as well.

As you can see here there is a button called Add Track Separator. This is used to separate out the tracks from an LP or Cassette which will normally just run though in one complete recording. This is a nice touch to keep all the songs separate.

Also you can see that at the bottom you have a guide to how much recording you will be able to fit onto the drive. This jumped to about 86 hours when switched to MP3 format.

By clicking on the Options button we can see various things relating to the recording functions. As this is a multi purpose application that can be used with different programs some of the options like Limit recording To x minutes are not intended for use here but instead for live capture of something else. Here you can also setup the save directory and Filename.

Moving onto the second option you can specify the settings of the saved files. Once again you have the option of format and quality.

Once you have setup your options it is time to record something. I spoke into the microphone and recorded some sounds from the TV to simulate the recording of a cassette. I even used the Add Track Separator button to split the recording up into separate tracks, as you can see below.

I also renamed the tracks and artists from the Default TrackXX name using the tools available to me.

Once you have all of your tracks copied into the program and renamed you can move onto the Identify and Enhance page of the program. This part of the program allows you to play with your recordings and improve them before burning.

The three main quality boxes are Clean, Enhance and Equalizer. The first Clean looks like this. Here you can clean up your recordings by removing the background noise or interference that you sometimes get from Cassette tapes and such things.

The next one is the Enhancer. Once again you can play your tracks through while adjusting the level to get optimum sound quality.

Finally there is the Equalizer. Here you can change the range of the signal to get the best sound out. For me this was just overkill but advanced sound users will probably be better used to this.

Once done you are taken to the last page. Here you decide what you want to do with your tracks. You can either burn them to disc, export them or edit them further in the Sound Editor which is more powerful than the one previously used.

If you decide to burn them to disc you are taken to the application used in the Create Audio CD project covered earlier.

If you decide to export them you are taken to this screen. Here you can select the output file along with the directory. The filenames you gave them earlier will be saved.

Capture Audio

Finally in this section we move onto the Capture Audio part.

As you can see this looks like the program that we have just used. Roxio has been clever here and designed one program that can be used by many different applications in the suite with only minor differences.

As this is basically the same application as before this time I tried out the MP3 capture settings.

Everything worked well. The sound was recorded and stored, it then played back perfectly in Windows Media Player.

Our Second section is Data

Program Run Through

Data