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[Jolo]

I'm always like learning from everyone's experiences.
I'd like to know about your experiences with burning with other commercial products and how you would rate the quality of the output, meaning, how good does it sound. Speed and features as well. Also, what burning techniques in software make it sound as close to the original source as possible.
For commercial products I have used MJ, Nero, Easy CD Creator and Record Now.
I've heard users from other forums rave about Feurio and read some stuff about CDMate.

Since I want to hear other opinions about quality of the burn, I'll talk only about functionality issues. Don't want to bias any opinions.

1 Record Now - best interface, has this cool Mix select, where the first part of the CD will be encoded as audio, then you can have related or videos and MP3s behind it. Stupidly, no label features, or even export features of play lists for label printing. Can't burn VBR which is important to me.Support stinks !! Stomp Inc sells the product, but has to wait on Veritas to decide to do anything about it as far as upgrades or bug fixes. That is the key to their bad support.

2. Nero - Can do it all as far as audio, audio data mixes, video. I use it after encoding video to VCD ro SVCD. Can be very complicated and has the worst tech support of any product I've ever seen. Real arrogant.

3. Easy CD Creator - To me they are a great coaster factory. Really don't like anything about their product. Find it large,over-bloated and error prone.

4. MJ - Does so much so nicely, has the best support and the most sincere, caring staff. I just see MJ growing and growing because they take the opinions of their customers seriously and price themselves so reasonably.
For me, the lack of audio and data on the same CD limits me. Very easy to move from playlist to burnlist, etc. Have had problems with freezing on WinME.

[Charlemagne 8]

The ONLY other ripping/coverting/burning software that I use besides MediaJukebox is Exact Audio Copy. http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
CVIII

[cjdshaw]

I use MJ and Nero. MJ runs most of the time on my HTPC and manages my entire media collection, so it definitely wins out for convenience. I can just grab a bunch of tracks from my tree and burn them. MJ doesn't directly support my burner though (LG GCC-4120B) so no CD text or gapless playback. That's where Nero wins. It supports everything.

[Galley]

Have not tried RecordNow, but have heard good things about it.  Cheesy CD Creator?  Yeah, right!  Nero is what I use for data discs.  For audio I use Feurio, which blows away any other product I have ever used. Feurio home page

[phelt]

I use EAC for music ripping. Decent interface, tons of features, I get exactly what I want.

For all other copying and burning I use CDMate. It may not be the best for absolute newbies because of language translation issues with its help file. But having had some experience with most other burners, I find it to be the most balanced between ease and features. I use to have a host of CD utilities - most have been replaced by CDMate.

Easy CD Creator has always been problematic in my experience.
I think Nero is one of the most over-rated softwares ever. But to each their own

[joe mama]

Love Feurio!

[KingSparta]

>> your experiences with burning
If you burn your skin it hurts

[Jolo]

To those who love Feurio, I have heard that from others,
But could someone who loves Fuerio, ? what it is about Fuerio that they like about it Better quality burns when listening, ease of use ?. Why do you like it so much.

I use EAC as well, but to rip CDs, not to burn them.
Then I use Lame to convert to MP3, with Razorlame as the frontend.

Any other products that are used to burn, like MJ ? Do any of them make a difference in how the music sounds. If yoou took the tame source music file and burned them in MJ, Fuerio, Nero, would any of them sound better than another ?

[datatrader]

"I'd like to know about your experiences with burning with other commercial products and how you would rate the quality of the output, meaning, how good does it sound.
Speed and features as well."

What a great question to get responses ! thanks for starting the thread JOLO...

MJ is a great jukebox... however I prefer to rip with Audiograbber then import into MJ.
Why? well it has a clean and intuitive interface... it does one thing... Rip... and it does it well. AND it's FAST on my machines running win 2000.

a major plus is that it doesn't put a single file in your windows directories.
No DLL's, OCX's, or device drivers, I've had so many programs that screwed with your registry or installed TSR's or even worse, spyware that ends up conflicting with other software.
You can set it up with the encoder of your choice. ( I prefer lame and record at 320 kbit/s)
Audiograbber can also automatically normalize the music, delete silence from the start and/or end of tracks, and send them to a variety or external MP3 encoders. Audiograbber doesn't add a single entry in the registry or win.ini.  SWEET !


Adaptec/Roxio has a nice 3 pane interface thats clear and intuitive however, It is extremly invasive and adds multiple entries to your registry that can cause serious conflicts with other software. Remove it all and be free !
For instance Adaptec installs a 'plug in' in windows media player (Which I don't use) that takes control of the ASPI layers that other programs install and disables them. This can cause the program to not detect the CDRW drive. If you have the Adaptec Plug-in you can correct the problem by uninstalling the Plug-in. You can uninstall the plug-in by going to control panel, add/remove programs and double clicking on the Media Player entry. A list of media player components will appear. Select only the Adaptec CD Burning Plug-In and click ok. This will uninstall the plug-in. After uninstalling the plug-in reboot.

"Also, what burning techniques in software make it sound as close to the original source as possible."

We've talked about this in other threads APE versus MP3... reviews and comparisons       Ape is the clear answer if audiophile quality is your only criteria. however if you're looking for other features like portability and file sharing a good choice is Lame's most recent version recorded at 320 kbit/s... Very high quality at a considerable savings in hard drive space compared to APE.

but I hope to learn more here...

your most humble supplicant, datatrader



BURN K DOE BURN... get on with your bad naugahyde self!

[Mirko]

I use EAC for ripping only because of it's proven (by experience from other users) secure ripping feature and the possibility of doing parallel ripping and parallel encoding (2 lame threads per EAC, 3 EAC sessions -> so the P4 is getting *warm*).
Maybe MJ sometimes can do parallel ripping (and asynchron encoding); then I might switch over (using EAC and importing into MJ is a lot of "work").

HTH,
Mirko

[joe|PLS|mama]

"what it is about Fuerio that they like about it"

I'll try to keep it relatively short.

I'm running Win98se, NEC dvd-rom, Plextor 12/10/32A cd-rw.  The Plextor came bundled with ECDC4.  It worked fine and was actually pretty stable.  I upgraded to ECDC5 Platinum (US$100) to get the crossfading feature.  This version was a little less stable, but overall, it worked well on my system.  Back in April, I did a re-install of Win98.  I then re-installed ECDC5 Plat and it would cause the NEC dvd-rom to stop working.  I uninstalled ECDC and the drive worked again.  Installed ECDC again, drive stopped working again.  I applied all the Windows and ECDC patches available as well as made sure I had current drivers for all my hardware...still no work.  So, I started using ECDC4 again, and everything was fine.  Just a note, this was all right before Roxio started their user-to-user help forum and also I was well past the 90 day tech support limit Roxio has, so contacting them for any help would have cost $35.00.

I then decided to try Nero.  I installed it and played around with it for a couple of days, but the user interface didn't really click with me.  Also, I didn't really feel like forking over another $69.00 for burning software.  So, back to ECDC4.

Then I was at a software store one day and they had boxed copies of Feurio! for $19.99.  I had been reading a lot of good things on Hydrogen Audio forums about it, so I decided to give it a try...and the price was right.

It's kind of funny that one of the reasons I didn't like Nero was the user interface, because I would not describe Feurio's interface as either intuitive or user friendly.  However, once you get it all figured out, it is really pretty cool.  The CD Manager lets you keep track of and work with multiple burning projects.  It can maintain an editable database of all your cds.  It can rip and encode using LAME.  It will decode MP3s on the fly while burning.  It has a sound editor that has a great non-destructive volume leveling option.  You can also non-destructively alter the amplitude of individual tracks in a project.  The sound editor will non-destructively split large wav files into multiple tracks (which is a great feature for ripping vinyl).  The CD Covereditor has some great features, especially for Various Artist CDs, but can be a little difficult to use.

I guess this would be a good time to point out that Feurio! only burns audio cds.  No data or MP3 cds.  From the Feurio! FAQ:

Question:   Can I also use Feurio! to burn MP3 CDs?

Answer: For this to happen a format for mp3 CDs would have to be generally accepted - at the moment unfortunately every vendor is "doing his own thing". As soon as a generally valid format for mp3 CDs exists, this will be included in Feurio!.

Question:  Can I also use Feurio!® to create /copy data CDs?

Answer: CREATION of data CDs with Feurio! is not possible as a) this would not work well with the concept of Feurio! and b) this would mean that Feurio! would be blown up to a program which would be far too large. This would also involve extremely high development costs which would mean Feurio! would have to become more expensive. Operating it would probably also become more difficult.

Another cool feature is that Feurio! can burn to more that one drive simultaneously if you are using Win2000 and have multiple burners installed on your system.

As far as burn quality, I've never had a problem with any disc I've burned with Feurio!, but I've yet to have any problems with any discs I made with ECDC either.  From what I can tell, though, Feurio! is very compliant with the Redbook standard.  Also, Feurio! does NOT install ANY drivers, system expansions, system files or other such things. No file is copied into the system folder or any other changes carried out.  For example, when I uninstalled Nero, it took my ASPI layer with it and it took me two days to get everything working again.

So, to summarize, I like Feurio! mainly for its project management features.  I currently have about 10 different audio cd projects setup in varying stages of readiness.  I can add or delete tracks to each project easily, change parameters globally for each project or for individual tracks.  Also, I am confident that it is burning cds that meet Redbook specs.

Links:

Feurio!

Feurio! Features

Feurio! FAQ

Hydrogen Audio forums