Nero 5 preview - Page 5

Final Conclusion

Our *preliminary* impression for Nero 5.0 is that Ahead managed to improve Nero and add some unique features for a CD Recording program. SuperVCD and VCD "still images and slideshows" are not included in any other CDR software package at this time being. Of course some other packages (VideoPack 5.0 from Cequadrat) will include those two new features but don't forget that we are talking about CDR recording software here, not a video authoring tool!

Ahead added a multiple burning option too. When reading about it we thought that it would work almost like Prassi PrimoCD Pro series did. However Ahead's approach is a little different. If you already have a Nero job running, you can't do any other task in Nero without opening a second program instance.

Nero's "Multiple Engine" is smart and when a CDR-W drive is occupied with one job it does't show up in drive's selection window. The same thing happens if you are doing a CD Copy job and thus occupying a CDR-W and CD-Rom drive. As we said, our tests showed that doing a combination of jobs (data+audio, data+videocd, eraseRW+eraseRW) with two CDR-W drives didn't produce any problem on first sight. In order to be sure, we need to run more tests on the "Multiple Burning Option" and update the review soon.

The AudioCD authoring has improved since the new filter engine allows you to preview them in real time. Splitting the audio files is also quite easy.

However , there are some features which most of users (including us) would like to see in Nero 5.0. The Nero 5.0 preview version didn't include RAW reading/writing. Nero is known to users for it's advanced CD Copy capabilities on protected CDs. However, in the market there are some new software packages which acquired the title for the ultimate copier (such as CloneCD). We believe that Ahead must include RAW reading/writing to it's CD Copy engine, especially since most manufactures plan to (or have already) supported MMC DAO RAW in their CDR/W models.