Burn a CD or DVD
Let's start with the basics as skills such as this are needed as foundation for many more to come.
Many new computers come bundled with a suite of software for burning CDs and DVDs such as Nero Burning Rom or Roxio RecordNow. Frequently these are watered down versions in hopes that the user will pay for a full license down the road.
The latest operating systems even have built in features to write to physical media including CDs and DVDs, but its not always the case.
I like to emphasis software that is readily available either open source, or otherwise available without cost to users. So depending on if you are burning a CD or DVD image file to disc or if you are creating your own compilation, I recommend ImgBurn or CDBurnerXP.
This is my goto software for burning audio discs for the next road trip (my car is new enough to have a CD player, but old enough I have no audio jack or ipod support) and for burning data discs for backups or to transit in some physical medium. In either case, the software uses drag and drop with a meter showing disc utilization:
The status bar along the bottom will keep track of the estimated disc space needed and remaining room on the disc for the medium you have sitting in the tray. Very useful for the multiple capacities available on disc lately.
Now can CDBurnerXP burn image files and ImgBurn burn compilations? Yes. But the use cases I've given here tend to be the strong points of each software.
A word of caution: As with may free softwares, navigate their sites with care. The developers need to support themselves and thus have advertisements, but many advertisements masquerade as download links. Secondly, on install, use care not to inadvertently install what I would classify as malware bundled with your software. On installing ImgBurn most recently, the defaults would have gotten me an install including Search Protect, Conduit Search, and Mezaa. All software I remove from computers in a typical malware cleaning.
Many new computers come bundled with a suite of software for burning CDs and DVDs such as Nero Burning Rom or Roxio RecordNow. Frequently these are watered down versions in hopes that the user will pay for a full license down the road.
The latest operating systems even have built in features to write to physical media including CDs and DVDs, but its not always the case.
I like to emphasis software that is readily available either open source, or otherwise available without cost to users. So depending on if you are burning a CD or DVD image file to disc or if you are creating your own compilation, I recommend ImgBurn or CDBurnerXP.
ImgBurn
For burning image files such as .iso to disc, I recommend ImgBurn. ImgBurn is geared towards this specific task. Lets say you needed to perform a recovery operation on a computer and downloaded the latest copy of Ultimate Boot CD (I'll write a post dedicated to this tool at some point). With ImgBurn, you put a blank CD in the tray, launch the software, click on Write image file to disc, and then select the .iso file. It really is that simple:
CDBurnerXP
For custom compilations, I recommend CDBurnerXP. CDBurnerXp is relatively intuitive and can burn all kinds of discs:
This is my goto software for burning audio discs for the next road trip (my car is new enough to have a CD player, but old enough I have no audio jack or ipod support) and for burning data discs for backups or to transit in some physical medium. In either case, the software uses drag and drop with a meter showing disc utilization:
The status bar along the bottom will keep track of the estimated disc space needed and remaining room on the disc for the medium you have sitting in the tray. Very useful for the multiple capacities available on disc lately.
Now can CDBurnerXP burn image files and ImgBurn burn compilations? Yes. But the use cases I've given here tend to be the strong points of each software.
A word of caution: As with may free softwares, navigate their sites with care. The developers need to support themselves and thus have advertisements, but many advertisements masquerade as download links. Secondly, on install, use care not to inadvertently install what I would classify as malware bundled with your software. On installing ImgBurn most recently, the defaults would have gotten me an install including Search Protect, Conduit Search, and Mezaa. All software I remove from computers in a typical malware cleaning.
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