Burn & Go Gold Review Speedy, Cheap, and Simple Eric Grevstad
PC novices are rarely up on the distinction between multisession and closed-session recording, but with HotBurn, they don't have to be: By default, the program will try to make your CD-R a multisession disc so you can add more stuff to its unused space later, but if you've specified a list of files that comes close to filling a new disc (even though HotBurn supports 80- as well as 74-minute CDs), a pop-up will prompt you that there may not be enough space to use "Close this session" and suggest you click a "Close entire disc" button.
If you're burning an audio CD, HotBurn lets you add tracks to and delete them from the file list or work area, clicking Play, Stop, and Pause buttons to preview selections (one at a time, with no Next/Previous controls or, as mentioned, audio editing functions).
While it supports the Burn-Proof technology that helps newer CD-RW drives avoid disc-munching buffer underruns, HotBurn gives you (in fact encourages) the option of using your PC's hard disk as an interim buffer for smoother writing. The program burns WAV as well as MP3 files to CD-R on the fly (it's fun to listen to your PC sound files in your car CD player, though brief sound effects like Windows startup chimes are too small to save as CD tracks). It also supports WMA, AIF, and a couple of other digital audio file formats (but not MIDI files) as well as audio CD tracks.
Whether for songs or data files, you can add items by clicking the plus-sign button, which summons a standard Windows File Open dialog box, or the Explore button -- which opens a Windows Explorer window above the HotBurn console, letting you drag items from the former into the latter.
When you've selected your tracks and/or files, click "Create CD" and sit back -- Iomega boasts that HotBurn is one of the fastest as well as easiest CD mastering programs on the market, and we were can't complain about its performance of 10 minutes to produce a full data disc even on our slow 8X Philips burner.
If you're making a compilation disc with tracks from several music CDs, the program prompts you to put different CDs in the source drive at the appropriate times. If you're bored, you can amuse yourself by switching HotBurn from its default to an alternative "skin."
Along with 20 circular stick-on labels and a plastic cone to make it easier to place a label on a disc resting in a standard jewel box, ValuSoft throws in a pamphlet pitching refills from label supplier CD LabelCorp and incorrectly saying the latter's design templates for FrontPage, Photoshop, and other programs are in a nonexistent folder on the Burn & Go CD. You can find a folder with some 10,000 pieces of ValuSoft clip art, but most of them looked cheap and sketchy even by mass-produced clip-art standards.
But HotBurn's own graphics editor lets would-be record producers design and print one-page jewel-box inserts, two-page booklet inserts, or disc labels using either a dozen-odd colorful if clip-artsy templates (weddings, Christmas, finances, so forth) or adding your own boxes, captions, and images via a bare-bones, Microsoft Paint-style interface. You can even center or stretch an image to fill the disc label, although getting the labels to feed through and adjusting the right margin and paper-size settings for successful output will take some envelope-style wrestling with your printer.
Though it's clearly not for power users (or novices who want more than brief, browser-based documentation), we like Burn & Go Gold -- it's a slick, nearly goof-proof way to speed through everyday CD-burning tasks. It's not as sophisticated as the big-name burner tools, but it saves you some dough or a few bucks. Presumably ValuSoft uses the spare bucks and does to stock its $10 Whitetail Fever game.
