CD-RW Mastering Software Shoot Out! Easy CD Creator: Round One! Douglas Smith
Most readers are probably familiar with Easy CD Creator, especially if they purchased a CD-RW drive over the last several years. It seems that most manufacturers included a lite version of this software as OEM. This software in most cases was adequate for most jobs, so many people didn't look any further. Easy CD Creator comes packaged with DirectCD. One problem that we had right out of the gate with this package was that several of the included programs would put memory resident programs (TSR's) in the system tray, eating up valuable memory each time we rebooted. This would also cause our machine to load more slowly than normal. We finally had to remove it from our startup manually. The installation of Easy CD Creator was very simple, following the prompts; the problem here is that each program included in this package seemed to have its own installation routine and required a lot of time to install.
Easy CD Creator includes an easy to use wizard that will guide most users through most recording projects. The wizard can handle most tasks, but unfortunately explanation of some tasks such as Audio recording was a little confusing and could possibly give a real novice user problems. The wizard just doesn’t give a good explanation in this area and a lot of trial and error will usually cost several blank CDs getting the hang of things. Also things like TAO (track-at-once) mode, which could give an extra few seconds of recording time over DAO (disc-at-once) mode is even less well explained by the wizard. There is more information in the help files, but bring a lunch and plan to spend considerable time looking it up. It would be far easier having a little explanation of DAO and TAO in the wizard.
Burn-Proofing seems to be the new buzz word these days, and Easy CD Creator didn't let us down! With the newer drives and larger media available today, having the ability to prevent buffer underrun errors is a real plus. Easy CD Creator supports this feature but very little reference is made to that fact. This feature may be either on or off based on support for the drive.
Easy CD Creator does support a large variety of hardware, which in itself makes this heavyweight giant really worth the investment, but the inability to turn off unwanted features is a real bummer! The Adeptec web site has an abundance of information and is updated quite regularly with the latest patches for there software. Tech support is pretty good when you come across problems that you can’t figure out right away. The Audio-CD creator does lack in one area and that is selecting track time totals and not just time left. One other small glitch was in the CD jewel case tool, which doesn’t list tracks that can be printed.
