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the long-awaited Easy CD Creator version 4.0 is out, and while it lives up to the hoopla, some of us could live without the cutesy additions that do less for user-friendliness than plain old user fury. Like Microsoft's dancing paperclip in Word, Adaptec has seen fit to include an annoying character in its own polished program.
This dancing disc, officially named CD Guide is every bit as irritating as Mr. Paperclip, is quite irritating. He shows up at installation with some silly music, but worse, like his metal cousin, he clutters your life through the main program, too, with no immediately obvious way to kill him and get on with your work. The trick is to right click him and"hide" him, or go to the help menu and choose "Show/Hide CD Guide" or click on the CD Guide toolbar icon.
Dancing distraction aside, however, there is nothing to knock in this worthy upgrade to Adaptec's flagship software product.
Inventory ...
In the flashy retail box, you'll find the Easy CD Creator install disc, a manual covering all the included programs, a registration card, a flyer for Arboretum Systems' Ray Gun sound editing software, the ever-present big red copyright warning sheet, and a rebate request form. Adaptec offers a rebate to owners of any of its CD products, PC or Mac, and also promises the same rebate to owners of just about any other recording software who take the competitive upgradeplunge with Creator 4.0. A nice surprise is the Hewlett-Packard CD labeler, which is not as fancy as some, but gets the job done all the same. Included are four labels, which seems a little stingy to me, but the labeler remains a nice added touch.
Finally, Adaptec includes an RCA to minijack audio cable to hook your audio equipment into your sound card for analog recording from tape or LP into Spin Doctor. Another nice touch. Also included, much to my dismay, is a little CD Guide sticker that you are apparently supposed to paste somewhere. I put mine on my forehead.
... Not Even Half the Story
It's not just the new, smoother look of the program, with Explorer-like buttons on the toolbar and pleasing gray colors, but the sheer quantity of software that comes in this package that shows this product's maturity. While bundled versions are unlikely to include all the featuresof the Deluxe software, Easy CD Creator is likely to remain the bundled software of choice for many CD-Recordable drive manufacturers and resellers.
Once installed, a look at the menu shows you just how much value you got for your money. In addition to Easy CD Creator, you have CD Copier, CD Spin Doctor, Jewel Case
Creator, Session Selector, Photo Relay, Sound Editor, Video CD Creator and, the Liquid Audio Player. Also included are MGI PhotoSuite II and MGI VideoWave. And don't forget one of the best new programs, Adaptec's backup software, Take Two. Of course, Direct CDis also included along with ScanDisc, which can detect and fix errors on Direct CD discs. CD Eraser is also available for quick erasure of CD-RW discs. The Take Two backup program uses Direct CD as its gateway to the CD as a backup medium. So, that's 15 products by my count--quite a bargain.
A new opening menu ties all the products together and allows the beginner to decide easily which program is appropriate for what task. Like its predecessors, Easy CD Creator uses simple drag-and-drop to define files to be recorded to disc, whether audio or data. Among the advanced features and improvements in this latest version are read after write verification, CD-Text support, and Digital Audio Extraction optimization. This last feature uses an improved resynchronization algorithm to allow for better extraction on drives that do not support accurate streaming of audio. Some other improvements include better ISO image handling, as you can now extract CD data tracks directly to an ISO image file. CD Copier looks the same but now supports Diso-at-Once copying. If you have a CD-Text-compatible audio player, the CD-Text support will be welcome, although your recorder must support this feature to make CD-Text discs.
One advantage of the Explorer-like interface becomes apparent in the Web Checkup feature,which seamlessly logs on to Adaptec's Web site with your browser and checks for updates to the programs. It lets you have some control over which programs you want to update and whether you want to download unified versions of the software.
The most renovated portion of the program is its handling of audio. Compact Disc database (CDDB) support is now in both Easy CD Creator and Spin Doctor so when you insert anaudio disc, you can log on to the CDDB database and retrieve the CD title, artist name, and song titles of the source discs from which you are recording. You can freely mix CD-DA, WAV, and MP3 files in an audio layout of both Creator and Spin Doctor.
Spin Doctor now extracts and encodes to the MP3 format in addition to extraction to WAV. Unfortunately, the extraction and especially the encoding seem unnecessarily slow. It took 312 seconds to rip and encode a five-minute song from a CD in a 32. CD-ROM drive. By comparison, Creative Digital Research's HyCD Play and Record can perform this task in 136 seconds, Xing's Audio Catalyst in 155 seconds, Music: Match Jukebox can do it in 162, and Real Jukebox from RealNetworks takes just 174 seconds to perform the same task.
Easy CD Creator supports gap editing, which allows you to set the amount of silence between audio tracks. It uses the format of seconds:frames. There are 75 frames per second and the gap can range from zero to 100 seconds. Within Easy CDCreator you can add fade ins, fade outs and centered cross fade effects between CD audio tracks.
Space does not permit a full examination of the extras included with Easy CD Creator 4.0 Deluxe, but it bears noting that many users will be happy to have MGI VideoWave to create and edit video and apply transitions, special effects, titles, and audio tracks. Also useful is PhotoRelay for making slide shows and electronic postcards and cataloging images and MGI PhotoSuite II is a good editing tool.
A Backup Tool by Any Other Name ...
The most welcome addition to the Adaptec recording suite is the Take Two backup software. I wondered about where they got the name and all I could come up with was that it will take at least two discs to back up many of today's hard drives. Obviously, there's some clever wordplay behind the name that I am missing. Its function, however, is crystal clear. Take Two creates an image of your hard disk on one or more CD-R or CD-RW discs. It's simple to use, and, like the recently released NTI Backup Now!, there are only three steps.Choose what you want to back up, choose where you want to back it up to and press Backup.
That's all there is to it, other than creating a boot floppy for disaster recovery. In addition to disaster recovery, Take Two can be used when adding a new hard drive. Just back up the current drive, install the new one, and restore. Take Two also boasts a verification feature, which enables you to boot with the floppy and verify the backup against the original files. This gives you the luxury of knowing (instead of hoping)that if you do in fact have a hard disk disaster, your backup set will allow you to restore the operating systems and all of your programs and files.
Take Two supports compression and source drive sector skipping, meaning that it wilt ignore empty sectors and not include them in the image. This saves backup time and keeps media usage to a minimum. Data spanning is also supported, allowing you to back up your hard drive no matter what its size. Take Two will also back up data to hard disk, and other removable media like Zip or Jaz drives.
Who'll Stop the Reign?
