One of the main advantages with having content on physical media, such as a USB storage drive or optical disc, is its portability.  However, as Virtual CDs are actually disc image files stored on the computer, they need to be first placed onto a removable medium before they can be accessed on another computer.  One way of doing this is to burn a Virtual CD to a physical disc as we showed on an earlier page.  However, a better way of carrying Virtual CDs on the move is create a Smart Virtual CD, which can be placed either on a USB drive or on an optical disc.

Creating a Smart Virtual CD

To begin creating a Smart Virtual CD, just select one or more Virtual CD images in the CD Management and go into the ‘File’ menu and select “Burn a Smart Virtual CD”.  Alternatively, right-click on one of the selected Virtual CDs and select this option from the menu that appears:

Once this option is chosen, Virtual CD will then ask whether to place this Smart Virtual CD on a CD/DVD or onto a USB drive:

Smart Virtual CD on a USB drive

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USB drives offer numerous advantages over physical discs, such as significantly quicker access times over an optical disc, faster throughput (where flash drive and PC are both feature USB2.0), larger capacity and smaller physical size (especially with pen drives).  While it is often possible to simply copy a CD’s content into a folder on a flash drive, some CD software will not function properly if not run from a CD or DVD and certain disc types cannot be easily stored on another media type, such as Video CDs, HDCD encoded audio CDs, mixed mode CDs, non-standard disc formats and so on.  This is where Smart Virtual CD comes in.

On the other hand, one drawback of using a USB drive containing Smart Virtual CD content is that its Virtual CDs can only be opened when the Smart Virtual CD reader software is first installed.  Virtual CD places this software on a USB drive during the creation of the Smart Virtual CD, so one does not need to have the Virtual CD suite in order to access the Virtual CD images.  However, as the Virtual CD reader software must be installed from the USB drive (if not already installed), the user needs to have administrator rights on their PC.  As a result, it may not be suitable for accessing Virtual CD images on work, university or college PCs if the user does not have administrator rights to install the Smart Virtual CD player software.

To start with, we are presented with the following screen:

On the above screen, we can add or remove Virtual CDs on the list, specify an ‘Autoplay’ option and the path to where the files will be copied to.  For the path, we select the root of a blank flash pen drive:

Once we select a path, it is just a matter of clicking ‘Copy’ and waiting for the files to copy over:

From our testing, it appears that Virtual CD does not mind if there is already content on the flash drive, as long as there is enough space free to copy over the content to.  The following shows the content of the root level of the flash disk after the copying has complete:

Even though we selected “Smart Virtual CD Reader” as the auto-play option earlier, it appears that Windows XP ignores the Autorun.inf file on flash drives.  The following screen shows what happens when we place this flash drive we just prepared into a PC that does not contain Virtual CD or its reader installed:

To launch the installation of the reader, we went into the flash drive and ran the “SmartVCD” program that has the icon of a CD and star.  This program must also be run even if the reader has already been installed in order to mount a Virtual CD.  This started the installation of the Virtual CD Smart Reader:

On the following screen, it gives a little info about the installation.  One thing we’re quite surprised about is that the info explaining about the requirement of the Smart Reader to access the Virtual CDs is not displayed on the very first screen:

During the installation, it will install a Virtual CD driver, much like with the installation of the Virtual CD suite:

Once this has complete, it will automatically load the Virtual CD.  If several Virtual CDs have been placed on the USB drive, the following menu will appear, giving a choice of which Virtual CD to load, as shown in the following example when we added a 2^nd Virtual CD to the drive:

As shown above, it is also possible to remove Virtual CDs from the flash drive or copy one or more of them onto the PC.  Once a Virtual CD is loaded, it will run depending on the Auto-play option set when the disc was copied.  For example, when we insert the “Virtual CD v9 installation disc” Virtual CD, it automatically starts up as if we loaded the physical disc into an optical drive:

As USB drives can only be safely removed when no application is accessing the drive, one minor issue we encountered with having a Virtual CD mounted from a USB drive is that it prevents Windows from being able to stop the USB device, giving the infamous “Problem Ejecting USB Mass Storage Device” error.  In order to safely remove the flash drive, the Virtual CD must be dismounted first by ejecting the virtual drive:

Where there is sufficient free space on the Flash drive, it is possible to add further Virtual CDs to the drive using the above process. 

Smart Virtual CD on a CD/DVD

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At a first glance, it may seem rather strange to go about placing a Virtual CD on a disc, particularly since it is usually possible to just burn a 1:1 copy of the Virtual CD to the disc, however, there are many situations where a Smart Virtual CD becomes practical.  For example, if one has a large collection of software CDs, making backup copies would mean having to make an identical number of backup discs.  However, with a Smart Virtual CD, it is possible to place multiple discs onto a single DVD.  As a lot of software CD titles occupy just a tiny portion of a disc, it also possible to place several of these onto a single CD.  By placing Virtual CDs onto a DVD, the performance is also greatly improved, as the drive does not need to seek as much when reading back the Virtual CD and most drives read data from recordable DVDs much quicker than from recordable CDs.

A few other examples include backing up a collection of Audio CDs and Video CDs, as it is possible to place 5 to 10 albums or 5 to 6 full Video CDs onto a single layer DVD (more on a double layer DVD), thus reducing amount of discs required to carry out the backup. 

After we choose the option to create a Smart Virtual CD on a CD/DVD, we get the following dialogue.  In this example, we chose a handful of Virtual CDs that we created from Audio CDs, along with our photographs Virtual CD:

Here we can specify the writer, write speed, write options along with the other options as shown on the screen for preparing a USB flash drive.  Once the disc is written, it works in much the same way as with a Smart Virtual CD on a USB drive, with the following exceptions from our experience:

• A CD/DVD containing a Smart Virtual CD automatically starts up when loaded, unlike a USB drive where the “SmartVCD” program must be started each time the USB drive is plugged in.
• It is not necessary to dismount the Virtual CD before ejecting the disc it is stored on, as this happens automatically when the disc is ejected.
• Virtual CDs cannot be added or removed on the disc.  With a rewritable disc, the disc needs to rewritten.

Like with a USB drive, a disc containing multiple Virtual CDs will display something similar to the following Virtual CD selection dialogue when loaded:

As with loading an Audio CD into a physical drive, the following dialogue shows when we load one of our Audio CD Virtual CDs:

Smart Virtual CD performance

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As we mentioned earlier, one significant advantage of placing Virtual CD images of CDs on a USB flash drive or DVD is a significant increase in read performance.  To give an idea of this, we will carry out a transfer rate test with Nero CD/DVD speed on one of our Virtual CDs we placed on a Verbatim 8x DVD+RW disc.  This disc was loaded in a Lite-On drive which can read this disc up to 8x and we got the following result from Nero CD/DVD speed:

While the performance will depend on how quick the drive reads the disc (usually much quicker for single layer DVD write-once media) and where the Virtual CD image is physically stored on the disc, we can clearly see the benefit of having a Virtual CD even on just a rewritable DVD.  The above graph is certainly not something the average optical drive can produce reading back a CD-RW, let alone a CD-R!  The reason the first few percent went off the graph is due to caching of the disc content as Nero CD/DVD tries spinning up the disc for several seconds.  The random access tests came out unusually low due to the Virtual CD reader not physically moving the drive head during the random access tests.

Performance & Write tests

Over-burning & User-defined DVDs