Prassi Software's CD Right! Plus

Emedia Professional, August, 1998 by Robert A. Starrett

There is something right about CD Right! and CD Right! Plus, a pair of recording programs from Prassi Software. You get this feeling right from the beginning. Maybe it's the fact that the entire program comes on one floppy disk, containing a 766KB setup file. Maybe it's the fact that the installation takes 20 seconds or so and the uncompressed software is still small enough to fit on a floppy disk, the whole program consuming only 1.37KB of disk space. Maybe it's the way the program is laid out visually, pleasing to the eye and giving you a complete status on recording functions. Maybe it's just that the darn thing feels so clean.

Best known for its SCSI multiplexing software, SCSI Rep, and its top-of-the-line duplication package, CD Rep, Prassi has now entered the mainstream recording market with a bang and you will soon see this software bundled with a lot of big-name recorders. The first to sign on is Sony with their newly released 4X/8X recorder, and Sony resellers and others are sure to follow their lead soon.

The new Prassi tool is available in two versions, the OEM-only CD Right! Personal Edition and the retail CD Right! Plus Edition. CD Right! Plus, reviewed here, retails for $99 and adds simultaneous copying to multiple drives, advanced CD image building, and the audio-specific CD Ditto DJ to the OEM-only version.

EASY CHOICES

The opening screen presents you with four choices, clearly explained: CD Copy (reproduce a CD by making a physical copy of it), Data CD-ROM (prepare a Data CD by dragging and dropping files into folders), Audio CD Compilation (record a complete audio CD compilation), and CD Ditto DJ (record an audio CD on-the-fly from any sound source). Each choice is accompanied by a convenient help button that brings up the help screen for that action. The pull-down menus are short and concise and offer quick and intuitive control over program actions and options.

The File, Edit, and View menus contain the usual suspects; the other available menus are CD Drive, View, Tools, and Help. The CD Drive menu shows attached drives and recorders, and there is a submenu attached to each device that contains three items, CD Explorer, Eject/Close, and Drive Properties. CD-R/RW drives will show an additional option, erase disc. The CD Explorer gives you a quick and complete status of the detected drive showing textually the type of CD, the number of tracks or sessions, the length of the disc, and the space remaining if the inserted disc is recordable. Additionally, the type of disc and its length are represented graphically on the right side of the screen by a large CD, colored appropriately to indicate remaining space and type of disc--gray for pressed discs and finalized audio and data discs, and gold for recordable, with the already-recorded area shaded in green. The CD Explorer window shows the number of tracks, start position of each track, and the length of the track.

Using CD Explorer, you can quickly extract any file or folder from a data CD or any track from an audio CD to the hard drive. When an audio CD is inserted, there are more options available in CD Explorer. You can edit the CD title or track title, play the CD, or extract a track or tracks to WAV files.

The Drive Properties submenu shows the manufacturer of the drive, the firmware version, Host ID number, Target ID number, Logical Unit Number, the type of interface and the source CD-ROM drive's capabilities for audio extraction and read speed. For CD recorders, it additionally shows available CD recording speeds, CD-RW writing speeds, and the drives' internal buffer size. The other tab on the Properties menu is Diagnostic, which allows you to test for audio extraction speed and accuracy, data read speed, and basic recording functionality.

SHINY TOOLS

The CD Right! Tools menu really shines, giving the user some options never before seen in a recording package. Some tools are included for convenience, others represent powerful new additions to CD recording flexibility. For example, within the CD Right! Tools menu you can launch Windows Explorer, Media Player, CD Player, and Volume/Recording Control. The next item on the menu allows you to turn auto insert notification off without the hassle of digging deep into the Control Panel in Windows to do it drive-by-drive, although a reboot is still required after auto-insert notification is toggled on or off.

CD Right! Plus also implements an innovative function called CD Blocking. CD Blocking, when active, prevents Windows or other programs from accessing CD-ROM drives or recorders while CD Right! Plus is active, thus preventing potential buffer underruns or other problems that may occur when another program or Windows tries to commandeer the source drive during the recording process. CD Blocking is accomplished through a virtual device driver, ptvsd.vxd, that loads at Windows startup. CD Right! Plus gives you the option of deleting the device driver if it conflicts with other virtual device drivers and the program will still perform normally, although it is up to the user to refrain from taking actions that will attempt to access source or destination drives during the recording process.