Product Reviews

Cakewalk sells this program as an essential tool for your music and media. You can see what it was thinking - everyone has an MP3 player, so they'll need a program that allows them to organise and work with their music files. That's all very well, but this is actually just a middle of the road CD and DVD burning package with the usual kind of audio-related extras.

Pyro does all the things you'd expect of a DVD burning program - including write to both DVD+ and DVD- dual-layer discs. You can rip music CDs to three file formats: MP3; WAV and WMA. This is a fairly limited choice, but there won't be any MP3 player you can't play at least one of the file types on.

Oddly, you can only manually vary the bit rate at which tracks are encoded for MP3 files, not WMAs, which can only be encoded

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at 128Kbit/s (Windows Media Player can convert at higher bit rates). Other extras include the ability to capture audio from external sources, such as your stereo and to convert music files into mobile phone ringtones. Cakewalk gives this prominent billing on the packing so it must be pleased with it. It works well enough, allowing you to upload ringtones straight to your phone, though we're not sure this should be encouraged. Pyro also makes you go through a fairly lengthy online registration process before you can use all of its functions, which is irksome.

Pyro looks and feels like a program that's been caught in a timewarp since the late 1990s. When you open it, you're confronted with a text-only screen that lists - in very small letters - all the things that the program can do.

The actual functions of the program are all available on a series of tabs, letting you flick quickly from one module to another. In practice, however, tabs were slow to respond when clicked on which made moving around the program a very sluggish business.

There's nothing very wrong with Pyro 5, it does what it claims to. But it looks and feels very old-fashioned and for £10 more, you could get the latest version of Roxio Creator. This has the same functions as Pyro and it comes with a reasonably good video-editing program as well. It also looks nicer and is easier to use.