Software Review: Ashampoo Burning Studio 7 - Part One

Oct 20th, 2007 | By Bill Vincent | Category: Technology

Let me tell you, I’ve used quite a number of CD/DVD burning solutions, including Nero, which in my opinion and experience is overpriced bloatware. I had planned on simply downloading it, testing it’s suitability for a review, then letting the free key run out. After playing with it for a few days, like Crossloop, it’s staying. In addition, for about half the price of the “Industry Leader” (chortle, snort) it’s a bargain.

When upon downloading the close to 22 meg file, you’ll be prompted for an email address. Don’t use a Hotmail addy, as it will be rejected by their system, and it won’t tell you why your info has been rejected. It’s just rejected. Your free trial reg code arrives via email, and you also get signed up for “service” emails. These “service” emails are precisely why I wanted to use my ’spam-trap’ Hotmail address. I’ve been getting 1 or 2 advertisements from Ashampoo daily ever since I signed up for my free trial reg key. You can opt-out, but this is one point against Ashampoo right off the bat. It’s not technically unsolicited, so it’s not technically spam. Luckily, that’s about the end of the negative points.

Working with Audio

The User Interface is simple and clean, but well-designed and professional. The first thing I attempted was ripping an audio CD into digital format. The program was unable to detect the Audio CD in my burner, which is the default drive. Could be because the drive itself was scavenged from a Gateway, but let’s not bash on Gateway today. They’ve been through enough. I used the pull-down menu to select my other optical drive and we were off and running.

BS7 automatically attempts to pull track and album information for you. It successfully identified my stepdaughter’s Spice World disk and labeled all tracks for me. Handy, but I was unable to find a option to disable this feature, nor any info about where the program retrieves the info from.

Please be respectful of the work and investment of copyright holders when copying any software, music or video. If you find yourself in the possession of media, and you like it, support the creators by paying for it.

I was given the option of de-selecting some tracks. I like this, as many CD’s have intro’s, interviews, and skits between songs that I have no interest in hearing ad nauseam. I could also, at this point, rename any tracks to my liking.

Unlike all other apps I’ve used, where you have to dig, sometimes deeply, for the output folders, BS7 displays the output folder on the next page and lets you change it. Points from me right there. You can also select the output type, Mp3 up to 320kBit/s, WMA, or uncompressed WAV. A little over 4 minutes later, I had my MP3’s in 200k glory.

Burning audio CD’s went smoothly as well. BS7 was comfortable with a variety of digital media, including OGG and FLAC. The audio level normalizer worked quite well, evening out the sound level over all tracks. I’ve used several burning apps that dropped the track onto the disc in the order you selected them, or even alphabetically. Here, I could move them up or down in the playlist as per my whim and fancy. The burn was quick and successful, the CD played well in every player in my house.

Making MP3 CD’s is something I haven’t done much of, but my newest home stereo supports this, so I tried it out. Much to my chagrin, I realized I should have read the stereo’s manual. It only supports up to 70 songs in each folder, so the other 90 or so that I burned onto the disc in the root folder were not read. My fault, not Ashampoo’s, eh? Lesson learned, RTFM, even if you don’t tell anyone you did it.

One significant feature about Burning Studio 7 is the Blu-Ray support. Sadly, I could not test these features. I’ve decided not to invest in Blu-Ray until I’m 100% certain that it’s going to come out on top of HDDVD. It’s looking like HDDVD is going the way of Betamax, but you can’t be too careful. I still remember my parents cursing as they dropped their BETA player in the trashbin.

Next installment: Video and Disc images

If there is any aspect of this software you’d like me to test out that you think I may miss on the next installment, leave a comment!!

Note: All testing was done on Windows XP Home edition. However, Windows Vista support has been verified from other sources.

[tags]software, ashampoo, gateway, MP3, burning [/tags]