After the installation of the Virtual CD Client has complete, a Virtual CD icon appears in the task tray and two new drives appear.  The following shows the Virtual CD task tray icon:

The Virtual CD drives show as follows when we go into “My Computer”:

In the screenshot above, drives ‘J’, ‘K’ and ‘L’ are physical drives, drive ‘N’ is a Virtual CD/DVD burner and ‘P’ is a virtual drive. 

Creating a virtual CD

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From our initial experience of using Virtual CD, this software is very user friendly and creating a Virtual CD is no exception.  The following gives a couple of examples of how this task can be started, so even an inexperienced user should have no problem starting this task:

• Choose “Create a virtual CD” from the disc action menu that appears upon loading the disc (assuming the Autoplay is enabled for the drive).
• Right-click on the drive in “My Computer” containing the disc and select “Create a virtual CD”.
• Click on the Virtual CD task tray icon and select “Create a virtual CD”.
• In the Virtual CD Toolbox in the “Main Tasks”, “Working with virtual CDs” or “All Virtual CD programs” section, go into “Create a virtual CD”.

In our demonstration here, we will create a virtual CD of the Virtual CD installation disc.  When we go into the wizard, it first analyses the disc and then shows the following screen:

Here, one can select the copy template, a quick copy file and whether to go into the expert mode.  Tooltips are available for most items to help with those new to the software.  For difficult to read or special discs, such as discs containing unreadable sectors or a non-standard disc structure, one can choose a different template or create their own, such as for reading RAW & Sub channel data, skipping unreadable sectors, changing the read speed, read disc geometry data and so on.  However, unless on is trying to read a damaged or a non standard software disc, the “Automatic copy” method is generally sufficient.

If the “Switch to Expert Copy mode…” option is chosen, the following screen three screens appear, starting with this one to choose from various advanced read parameters:

On the next screen the user can choose the type of file to create, file name, location and the compression level to apply on the resulting virtual CD:

On the final screen, the user can password protect the virtual disc, auto-start a program when loading the virtual disc, assign a keyboard shortcut, add a comment and specify a few other advanced settings:

As the Virtual CD installation disc appears to be just a standard CD-ROM disc, we provided a description and clicked ‘Finish’ without selecting any expert copy mode options.  At this point, it begins creating a virtual CD of the disc:

During this creation process, it is possible to specify certain a few tasks to do once the creation process has complete.  The above screenshot shows the default tasks.  The “Shut down computer” option can come handy if the PC is left running while one is at work or off to sleep, especially with slow to read discs that contain a lot of unreadable sectors.

Audio CDs

When creating a virtual CD from an audio CD for the first time, Virtual CD will need to be configured with a remote CDDB source to retrieve audio track information:

By clicking ‘Yes’, it displays the following screen where one or more CDDB sources can be entered.  It has the popular freedb source by default:

One of the screens gives the option to select which tracks to make a Virtual CD from as well as the ordering of the tracks:

Like with creating a Virtual CD from a data disc, it gives various the various other screens shown above, since it is quite common to find discs with data sessions, not to mention discs using non standard formats that try hiding or preventing the extraction of the audio tracks.

Loading a virtual CD

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Once one has one or more virtual CDs created, it is possible to load a virtual CD into a drive using a variety of methods.  The quickest way is to right-click on the Virtual CD task tray icon, select a drive to use from the menu, select ‘Insert’ from the sub-menu and select the virtual CD from the next sub-menu:

At this point, the virtual disc will work the same as loading a physical disc in a drive, but with all the advantages of using a virtual disc, such as no spin-up time, faster performance, no worry if the disc has developed a defect, no drive noise and so on.  Other advantages include no worries about dropping and scratching discs or breaking jewel cases while in a hurry, time spent looking for misplaced discs and so on.  The above example can be done in just a few seconds!

A virtual CD can also be loaded in “My Computer” by right-clicking the drive and selecting “Insert a virtual CD” or by using the CD Management:

In the Virtual CD Management as screen shown above, a disc can be loaded by either dragging & dropping the virtual CD from the left pane to the desired drive in the right pane or by right-clicking the virtual CD and selecting “Insert into…”

Loading a Disc image

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While the majority of disc burning software suites offer the ability to write disc images as physical discs, it can be quite tedious to create a disc only to load that disc back into the machine the image was burned to disc on.  If one has badly named ISO’s, finding out which is on each ISO makes matters only worse if one has to burn a disc from each ISO just to see what’s in it!  With Virtual CD, it is very simple to mount an image with a Virtual drive and use it as if it is a physical disc. 

To mount a disc image, just right-click on the disc image file, select “Insert the virtual CD into” and then select the drive:

If the image is of a disc that auto-plays, it will automatically start the moment it has mounted.  The mounted disc image can be later ‘ejected’ in the same way as ejecting a virtual CD.

Creating a 1:1 copy

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While it is handy to have a collection of Virtual CDs present on the system, there are times when it is necessary to make a physical copy of a virtual CD or of another disc, such as to use a disc as a boot disc or even use it in a device which does not have Virtual CD or where it cannot run, such as a standalone CD or DVD player. 

Creating a 1:1 copy is about as simple as loading a virtual CD.  Load up the CD Management tool and click ‘1:1 copy’.  To create a 1:1 copy of an existing virtual CD, just click the image first before clicking the ‘1:1 copy’ icon:

On the CD/DVD burner dialogue, select the drive or file source.  If a virtual CD was selected before clicking the ‘1:1 copy’, this will be selected by default.  It is also possible to select a disc image, such as an ISO file by clicking the ‘Open’ icon.  Select any desired options, such as write speed, eject CD after burning and so on and then click ‘Burn’:

Modifying the properties of a virtual CD

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If one builds up a large collection of virtual CDs, which would most likely be the case in a large business network, it is very useful to be able to add information and comments to virtual CDs or even modify other parameters such as setting a password or to prevent it from auto-running when loaded.  For example, if there are any special instructions what would normally be printed on the physical disc’s jewel case, these can be added to the comments section. 

To edit the properties of a disc, go into the CD Management, right-click on the virtual CD and select ‘Properties’.  Alternatively, click on the virtual CD task-tray icon, go into the ‘Properties of’ sub-menu and select the disc image.  This will bring up something similar to the following:

On this first screen, it is possible to set certain parameters, such as the disc description, icon, password and so on.  A hotkey can be useful to automatically insert the virtual CD by pressing a certain key combination.  The CD label field is read-only, at least on the virtual CD image we’ve used in this example. 

The following shows the comment tab, where comments can be made about the virtual CD:

The Virtual CD tab shows a few details about the disc, including its size, creation date, disc type, if it is encrypted, in use and the file name & location it is stored.  The Directory Structure tab shows the directory structure of the image.  Finally, the creation process details tab shows the creation log of the virtual CD.  This also includes any errors encountered, such as the example in the following screenshot:

Search for virtual CDs

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Like looking for CDs in the real world, it is quite easy to have end up having disc images placed throughout one or more hard disks on a PC.  Without Virtual CD, looking for a particular disc image would mean searching the hard disks for various types of file formats (ISO, NRG, BIN, etc.) and to even manually test some one by one if their filenames are not clear.  Virtual CD on the other hand has the ability to search for a wide range of disc formats and displays the disc label, type, date and location of each result. 

The search feature can be brought up by going into “Find virtual CDs” within the Toolbox or by going into Virtual CD’s task-tray menu, into the “Virtual CDs” sub-menu and selecting “Find”:

The search gives the option of which formats to search, other formats and where to search.  The Directory Selection drop-down gives the option of all drives, default Virtual CD path and a specific location:

The following shows an example of a search we carried out:

From the results shown, it is possible to do a variety of tasks as shown in the right-click menu:

As disc images can take up a lot of hard disk space, we find the search feature makes a useful straight forward way to compare two results to see if the images are identical, particularly when the results are sorted by description/CD label.  To compare two, just select two results (click the first and hold down the ‘Ctrl’ key to click the second), right-click either of the selected results and select “Compare CDs”.  On the dialogue that appears, click ‘Compare’.  It is also possible to a result to a physical or virtual drive.

Updating Virtual CD

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There are a number of ways to keep Virtual CD up to date.  If the PC has a live Internet connection and Virtual CD has been configured to automatically check online for updates, it will display a dialogue similar to the following when a new Virtual CD update is available:

If the PC has no direct connection to the Internet or the automatic update check is disabled, the website will show the latest version currently available on its homepage.  From our experience of the last few updates, all the Virtual CD versions appear to be consistent in version numbers, with updates for all editions being released at the same time.  When the “Go to Download” button is pressed on the above dialogue, the Virtual CD online download webpage appears, listing all the updates available: 

Minor client updates such as updating from Version 9.x to Version 9.2 can be downloaded directly from the page.  As shown above, it also offers several versions of the client software, however, only the latest versions are available for the full versions.  File Server, Terminal Server and Network Management Server updates are only available as full versions, where the license key must be provided to obtain a download link.  A full version of the client version can also be obtained by providing the license key:

The e-mail address field is mandatory, as once the license key and non-computer readable access code have been keyed in, the download link will be sent to the e-mail address that has been provided.  After the correct license number and access code have been entered, the following screen appears. 

The download link that gets e-mailed out will only work for up to 7 days after the time of the full version request.  After this, the above process will need to be repeated to download the full version again.  Once the new version or update has been downloaded and installed, the PC needs to be rebooted for it to complete successfully, at least for the client, file server and terminal server editions.  As a result, we would suggest only installing an update or new version at a suitable time when the PC or server can be rebooted:

Introduction

Virtual CD Editor