CD Maker Platinum is a decent package for novices wanting to write CD and DVDs. Read our Australian review.
CD Burners are everywhere, and along with them is an army of CD burning software titles. It's highly unusual to find a CD-RW drive that doesn't come with some kind of bundled burning software. For many users, that first piece of software is more than likely the software that they'll use for the life of the drive, especially if thier needs are essentially simple. Any software that sells independently of a drive, therefore, needs to really stand out from the crowd -- why spend money on software with functionality you've already got?
CD Maker Platinum's hooks are primarily aimed at multimedia users, which makes reasonable sense -- if all you use your burner for is data backup, it doesn't matter which application you utilise. It's also one of the more friendly applications we've seen for new users, although power users used to burning with appications like Nero might find its hand-holding approach a little stifling.
One feature aimed straight at the home user is the ability to create slideshow VCDs and SVCDs from your pictures and music for playback on most CD-ROM and DVD drives. VCD quality certainly isn't exceptional, and you'll need to make sure you have decent quality pictures if you plan to display them on a TV screen. The one thing that irked us with the VCD creation -- and indeed with any of CD Maker Platinum's burning screens that involve audio is that capacity is measured in minutes, not MB, and on a fairly unprecise visual scale. It took us a while to get used to the idea that a directory of images represented ten minutes worth of data; it'd be nice to be able to toggle to a pure data view of your CD layout. It's not a problem that occurs in data burning modes, but we were unable to find any toggle feature.
For audio CD creation, CD Maker offers audio volume balancing to equalise the volume across a variety of tracks. We tried this feature over a number of CDs. Our end conclusion was that it improved audio levels on about 20% of our tracks, but degraded about another 20%. It's definitely a feature you'd need to carefully test on a track by track basis. There's also a bundled WAV editor, although if you're keen on serious WAV editing, we'd suggest a more fully featured package than the rather bare-bones approach on offer here.
Burning your disc is only one part of the equation though, and NTI CD Maker Platinum also includes a CD labelling utility called JewelCase Maker. Again, baby steps are the order of the day here, as everything is template based. While some of the provided templates are visually horrible, there's no accounting for everyone's taste. It's certainly not difficult to use.
CD Maker Platinum also boasts DVD writing capabilitiesalthough we were unable to test this. The only DVD writer we had at the time of writing -- the DVD-R/RW/RAM drive in a Toshiba Satellite 5200 -- wasn't a supported drive. CD Maker Platinum does allow for live internet updating, so hopefully in the future the range of supported DVD drives will increase.
In terms of disc writing, we hit no errors while using a 16x drive. As we expected, burning a slideshow VCD/SVCD took much longer, as it must encode the combination audio and video to MPEG. One side effect of needing to do this is that it ships with a rudimentary but workable AVI to MPEG encoder.
NTI CD Maker Platinum doesn't really contain enough to make experienced CD/DVD burning afficionados change their platform. If, on the other hand, you're new to CD creation, its simple layout and hand-holding approach could be just what you're looking for.
NTI CD Maker Platinum
Company: NewTech InfoSystems
Price: AU$99.95
Distributor: Quadtel Marketing Results
Phone: 02 8852 4600
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