Ashampoo Burning Studio 7: Burn, Baby, Burn Chapel Hill NC

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Burning Studio 7 offers clear options for burning files and folders, backing or restoring files, burning or ripping music, burning movies, copying discs, creating disc images and more If you need a program to copy or burn CD or DVD discs, you want first-rate software that is reliable and easy to use while also offering lots of flexibility and support for a wide variety of files and formats. For this, the recently released Ashampoo Burning Studio 7 offers a full-featured and intuitive solution.

Disc burning programs let you select a series of files, whether they are data, audio, or video files, and burn them onto a CD or DVD disc in the formats that you wish. For example, if you're working with word processing and spreadsheet files, such a utility will allow you to copy and archive them onto a data CD or DVD disc for backup.

On the other hand, when you're working with audio files, you can choose to back up WAV or MP3 files onto data CDs, or burn them onto a CD that plays music in your entertainment center or portable player. And in a similar fashion, you can archive video files onto a data disc or burn them onto a DVD disc that works just as a movie DVD does in your player.

Regardless of the type of disc that you want to create, Burning Studio makes it easy to select files and burn them onto a disc of your choosing. You simply select an option: "Burn Files", "Backup Files," or "Burn Movies" and the program walks you through the necessary steps. It's an excellent approach for novices.

What's New in Version 7

Ashampoo Burning Studio 7 adds useful new features such as DVD and Blu-ray video burning capabilities, the ability to create modified copies without having to completely rebuild and define them, and support for working with and burning bootable discs. It's a significant upgrade over previous releases, and the new video/DVD features will likely be the most beneficial additions for the majority of users.

To create a DVD disc that runs in a DVD player, the program lets you select files and then choose a menu format before burning the disc. The program supports common video formats that include WMV, AVI, MPEG, and ASF, which should cover most of the bases, and converts these formats automatically. The process is indeed easy and painless.

Depending on the program that you're using, building and debugging a DVD menu can be a complicated undertaking. DVD menus are the screens that you see and use when you insert a movie DVD into a player and then select options such as "play movie," "extras," and more. With Burning Studio 7, you can choose from several menu styles and the program does all the work to generate the navigation elements.

Before you burn a movie DVD, you can preview how menus will appear and work The downside to this approach is that you're stuck with the limited templates that a program provides. However, Burning Studio 7 offers some fairly attractive animated and static menu styles. And before you burn your disc, you can adequately preview how menus will appear and work.

If you have more than two hours of video that you want to burn onto a single DVD disc, the program can increase the compression and adjust encoding to make everything fit onto one disc. Visual quality can, of course, take a hit, but it's great to have the option available. The program can also burn Blu-ray discs if you're one of the few who owns such a burner.

If you're so inclined, you can also burn video onto CD discs to create VideoCDs and Super VideoCDs. These days, however, with the price of blank DVDs so low, there's probably little reason to do this and then have to potentially deal with all of the compatibility issues.

Restoration Hardware

Version 7 of Ashampoo Burning Studio also offers improvements to its file backup and restore functions. You can now specify the size of backup files and, when restoring files from backups, choose individual files or folders that you want to restore instead of having to restore everything. As before, you can automatically split files to fit on individual discs and apply password protection and compression.

Audio ripping features now include an integrated MP3 encoder that lets you rip songs directly into MP3 format as well as to WMA or lossless WAV. The program also retrieves album and track names from Internet databases.

Ashampoo offers an array of advanced burning options with helpful explanations The program copies CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs and offers a feature that erases any rewritable media. If you like, you can save projects as files to conveniently burn the same discs later. A big addition for power users is a "Modified Copy" function that lets you select and insert additional files and folders before you burn a disc. It's easier in version 7 to create new versions of bootable installation discs, and a new feature lets you build bootable discs by importing boot images.

The Ashampoo Burning Studio 7 interface is intuitive, clean, and easy to use and offers clear options for burning files and folders, backing up or restoring files, burning or ripping music, burning movies, copying discs, creating disc images, and more. Selecting files is a simple matter of dragging and dropping them, and a gauge at the bottom of the screen indicates in a visual way how much space is left on your target disc. Also, as you work, the program serves helpful advice on burning options.

Put It on Disc

When you purchase a standalone DVD burner or a computer with a disc burner, you'll often receive a utility that performs many of the functions of Burning Studio 7. For many, these utilities will probably be adequate.

But when you're feeling limited by the utilities that you already have, it's worth considering Ashampoo Burning Studio 7. Here, Ashampoo helps by letting you evaluate its software for free for 30 days. You can't go wrong. And if you already own version 6, the upgrade to version 7 is worth it if you can use the video burning features or the esoteric copy and boot features.

Ashampoo Burning Studio 7 retails for $39.99 ($24.99 upgrade).