CeQuadrat WinOnCD 3.6 power edition - product enhancement to CD recording software WinOnCD 3.6 power edition - Statistical Data Included

Emedia Professional, August, 1999 by Robert A. Starrett

is there one CD recording software product that does it all? Probably not. But the new WinOnCD 3.6 Power Edition, developed by CeQuadrat and now sold by Adaptec [See "Adaptec Acquires CeQuadrat," p. 13--Ed.], comes as close as anything on the market today. CeQuadrat, based in Germany, has been producing top-notch recording software for years and is a favorite among CD bundlers in Europe and around the world where you see it bundled with Ricoh, Plextor, Mitsumi, and Yamaha recorders. It is finally catching on in the United States, currently shipping in its OEM version with Ricoh recorders.

The OEM non-Power Edition lacks a few of the features of the Power Edition such as hybrid support, PQ subcode control and the Extended Video CD Editor. But current users can upgrade for $69, and many have been doing so. The Power Edition is the boxed retail product with a suggested retail price of $99.95.

power for the people

It's hard to know where to start in listing the features and capabilities of WinOnCD Power Edition. The first thing that strikes you when you open the program is the number of disc formats supported. Under the six-tabbed startup screen, which contains Favorites, Data, Audio, Copy, Video, and Other, the disc choices are laid out with colorful icons. Under data, we see support for CD-ROM, Append Session, UDF IS0 9660, HFS IS0 9660, and Bootable CD. Under Audio, we see CD Digital Audio, CD Text and CD Extra. Copy lists just one item, Copy; Under Video, we have Video CD 2.0 and the video CD Extended Editor. The other contains Track Image and Custom Project. There is also a Favorites section that lets you mix and match the various supported formats that you use most in one window.

Several different views are available in the New Project window. Once you choose the type of disc you would like to create, the three-part main program window opens. On the top left is a listing of all attached storage devices. The top right window shows the content of each device as you select it. The bottom window contains the CD project and, like other programs, you simply drag from the top windows and drop files or folders into the project window. Two views are available in the project window, Tracks and Editor. Tracks shows the current track and its properties and Editor allows you to add, delete, move, and rename files.

The menu in the Project window allows you to view the track properties, import a session from a CD-R, check the image for ISO compliance, verify the job with the completed disc, and move files around for disc optimization.

Right-clicking on any file brings up the File Properties dialog and lets you see both the IS0 9660 and Joliet filenames and set the hidden attribute on a file. This dialog also has a Placement tab that allows you to set the priority of the file. Default priorities are high, low, and normal, but you can also click "Manage Priority Levels" which lets you create and name custom priority levels tailored to your particular needs.

There are two other buttons on the Project Window, Artwork, and Disc. The disc dialog controls the recording process. You can set Multisession/Close disc, Simulation, Simulate then Write, and Write Immediately. Here you can also choose what recorder you wish to write to and at what speed. A recorder information button shows you the type of recorder, BIOS version, SCSI ID of both the recorder and the host adapter if applicable, the name and version of the recorder driver, the capabilities of the recorder, the data buffer size, and the available recording speeds. Clicking the Artwork button brings up the Artwork Editor where you can create custom labels, booklets, and inlay cards. This is a full-featured editor which can import images in BMP, JPG, and WMF format.

for the power elite

WinOnCD Power Edition makes it easy to create autorun discs and bootable CDs. To create an autorun disc, you right-click on the file that you want to run upon disc insertion and the program automatically generates the necessary autorun.inf file and allows you to choose the icon that will be displayed when the disc is inserted into a CD-ROM drive. To make a bootable CD, you specify the image name and location the platform (Intel, Macintosh, PPC) the emulation mode and, optionally, the load address and number of sectors to load on boot.

WinOnCD is one of the few remaining recording programs that continue to have an emulation feature. Emulation--that is, building a disc image on hard drive and assigning a drive letter to it so you can access the image like a CD and test its performance as such--is a feature that has largely been dropped from recording programs since CD-R media has become so affordable (and the prospect of wasting a one-off less costly). A cornerstone of DVD premastering in its relative infancy, emulation can still be a useful feature for CD-R in many cases, even at its more advanced evolutionary stage.

other voices, other rooms

The audio handling capabilities of WinOnCD Power Edition are top-notch. The program has a built-in database of CD titles and tracks, so when you insert an audio CD, the database is queried and the CD title and song names appear instead of the usual "Track 1, Track 2." You can easily transfer these names to the label or jewel case insert in the Artwork Editor. In fact, you can even mix MP3 and WAV files in the same audio job. Extraction from CD to WAV is quick and easy, and you can invoke jitter correction if necessary to make sure that you get a clean extraction on drives that that don't have the accurate stream feature. In fact, WinOnCD captured a three-minute song from an UltraPlex Wide 40X drive in 11 seconds, the same amount of time that it took the extraction-optimized Plextor Manager to capture that same track.