HyCD's play&record 1.3 - Product Announcement

Emedia Professional, May, 1999 by David Doering

learning software is just too darn hard. All too often, I get my hands on a seemingly wonderful product, then discover that the bloated number of options on multiple screens, scant help, and lack of tech support make the product unusable. Sure, a techno-junkie like me can figure it out ... eventually. But what about the vast number of regular users out there? Are they going to want to wade through cryptic procedures to get something done? Probably not.

To my great surprise, the latest suite of CD recording tools from HyCD, Inc. (a.k.a., Creative Digital Research)--developer of cross-platform products for recording within UNIX, Macintosh, and PC operating systems--so thoroughly breaks the mold that it may set a new standard by which similar products will be judged and ultimately imitate.

so simple even a novice can play

Normally, I'd go right into a discussion of a product's features. In this case, though, it's important to delineate what makes working with Play&Record so wonderful. After all, we've seen easy-to-install products featuring UDF support. We've also seen MP3 recorders, players, encoders, and decoders, not to mention wizards, which significantly improve a product's user-friendliness. But what HyCD has done with Play&Record is brilliant--and the picture of simplicity itself.

Specifically, HyCD has eliminated the program interface entirely. Wondering how HyCD could achieve the impossible, I was pleased to find no surprises during installation. There's a new HyCD icon in the System tray at the bottom of the screen, but it just pulls up a registration screen--no tools apparent there. Then I inserted a blank CD-R disc into my Philips CDD 3610 CD-R/CD-RW recorder and encountered a message in plain English such as rd never seen in a CD-R tool before.

HyCD has actually simplified the choices for the media menu to the point of eliminating even the possibility for confusion. Instead of reading the obligatory "Check here to create a data CD available as a drive letter" message, Play&Record asks, "Do you want this CD to act like a floppy?" The alternative is to treat the blank disc like an audio CD. Compared with other programs, which refer to drive letters and such, this plain English approach is refreshing.

At the heart of Play&Record is its MP3 and music CD recording capability. It includes the FX program, which converts LP, tape, and audio files to CD format; a Sampler to convert MP3 to CD format; and an Encoder for converting WAV files to MP3 format (this can run as a standalone feature too). But the knock-your-socks-off part is in the software's recording capability and integration with Windows Explorer.

Believe it or not, this is all the interface you need to record MP3 files to a music CD. Just copy and paste to the drive. In a technical triumph, HyCD's Play&Record software functions with just two new menu options in the Windows Explorer pop-up menu. The HyCD Copy option even recognizes an MP3 file, so when you paste to a blank CD-R disc, it knows that you want to create a music CD out of the disc. It will then automatically convert the file from MP3 to CD format and add it to the music on the CD.

Remarkably, there's no separate application and no wizard, so there's nothing new to learn. Music lovers don't have to sort through the intricacies of MP3, CD formatting, sampling rates, or other technical issues. Sure, this won't serve the needs of some audiophiles, but for the vast number of users, Play&Record finally makes good on the promise to make computers simple. It's dazzling.

Of course, Play&Record shows you the current playlist for the music CD prior to doing the actual recording, so you can change the order if you want. (The product has information on 1.4 million song titles.) After that, you press Record and, within a few minutes, have created a nifty music CD without cracking a manual or learning about buffer underrun. The suite also lets you do WAV-to-CD and CD-to-CD recording as well.

I want my UDF!

Next, I decided to treat a new blank disc as a floppy. Now, I knew that this option placed UDF formatting on the blank CD-R, but many other users wouldn't care about what UDF is. However, pretty much everyone understands how floppies and Zip disks work, so the software's plain English approach will definitely make UDF more appealing to a wide audience. After I selected the floppy option from the main menu, my new UDF-enabled CD-R acted like a big floppy disk, allowing me to drag-and-drop files as I would using a floppy or Zip disk. [It also let me delete files from it as well.) This feature mirrors most UDF packages.

Play&Record is different, though, in its use of the latest UDF version [2.0), giving it a competitive advantage over products like Adaptec's DirectCD, which only supports up to UDF 1.5. The newer UDF version demands fewer power calibrations on a drive and thus increases the usability of a CD-R/CD-RW disc. More importantly, it fully supports Windows' security Access Control Lists, making it a sizzling solution for computer backups and network users.