Product Reviews

WinOnCD, one of the leading CD writing software packages, has had a bit of a bumpy ride recently. Initially owned by CeQuadrat, it was bought by rival company Adaptec, whose software branch is now known as Roxio. Roxio had a rival product, Easy CD Creator, but continued to develop WinOnCD, and now a new version has been launched - WinOnCD 5 Power Edition is stuffed to the brim with neat new features to get more from your CD burner than ever before.

Naturally, the new version knocks out data and audio CDs with the minimum of fuss, but then so does any other such software, so it's really the fancier features that'll convince anyone to spend over £40 on it. And for those who are tempted, the list is numerous. There's a barrage of CD formats to choose from, ranging from bootable and auto-start CD-ROMs to CD Extra (which combines audio and data). You can even create DVD data discs if you're rich enough to own a DVD burner. Data OverSpan allows large files to span several CDs - perfect for archiving huge raw video files. You can burn MP3s to audio CD

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without having to convert them to .wav format first, and create MP3s too. There's also a wide range of tools for pepping up your audio files, with fades, pitch shifts and a collection of fairly outlandish effects.

VideoCD authoring is supported, allowing you to burn home videos onto CD-R and play them on most DVD players. VCD quality is fairly basic, so it's good to see that SVCD is also included, as it offers quality that's nearer to DVD. Alas, not many players support it though. Sadly, you can't create DVD Video discs, or Mini-DVD, which puts 20 minutes of DVD video onto a CD-R.

The software can create VCD menus to navigate the various video files or to display a slide show, although linking up the pages is a daunting task. Thankfully, the CD-ROM Emulator utility comes to the rescue, allowing you to burn to a virtual CD-ROM on the hard disk - this allows you to check that you've done your menus properly before committing them to a real CD-R. Another excellent touch is the option to include Video CD playback software on the CD-R, allowing all PC users to view your discs.

WinOnCD 5 certainly offers some powerful features, and generally implements them well. The problem is, if you're only after its video authoring or audio editing features, you'll find that dedicated software does the job much better. For those burning their own compositions to CD, a proper stereo editor such as Sound Forge XP is a much better bet. Meanwhile, the DVD and Mini-DVD authoring included with many video editors renders the VCD functions fairly useless. However, for those who want to create a variety of specialist CD formats, it's hard to fault.