Burn the Best CDs and DVDs

Today you can do a lot of entertaining “stuff” with your computer. You can make home movies, photo albums and slide shows. Sort, file, and store your music. You can even do some office and school work. Al of these require storage and, until recently, most of these tasks needed a different software program that you had to buy, learn and finally use.

I recently tried NTI’s new all-in-one CD & DVD software program (NTI Titanium) that seamlessly merges all of these products (and more) into one elegant, simple to use program for PCs. Mac users need not yet apply. You can go from automatically creating slide shows, to DVD video authoring, to CD/DVD burning, playback and even on to backup and recovery. The price won’t sting you, as this is about the best suite of tools I have used, and the whole package is only $79.99 (hint: you may even find it for less on the net). It’s easy to use, but comprehensive enough to meet the needs of both novice and experienced users.

Using NTI’s well-designed interface, you can quickly move from one job to another in the blink of an eye. NTI Titanium’s Photo Slide show feature can automatically add effects and transitions which synchronize with your background music, this makes it quick and easy to produce a slide show, add personalized audio, super transitions and eye-popping special effects including the ability to pan, zoom, rotate, crop and add text to the photos.

The slide show feature is nifty, but you really buy a program like this to burn CDs and DVDs. Titanium’s DVD Fit solution lets you store 8.5GB dual-layer DVD movies onto a single 4.7GB single layer disc without having to stop and burn the content to a second disc. In addition, the software lets you write to all types of DVD-R media including the new Double Layer (DL) 8.5GB discs. This allows you to store up to 4 hours of theater quality video or up to 120 hours of MP3 audio on a single disc! That’s 5 days of non-stop music my friends! Maybe a bit much for most of us, but you get the picture…this is one versatile program.

In addition to detecting the correct speed required for your computer’s optical drive and media, the software automatically chooses the correct writing method and includes CD overburn support (this lets you burn to the very edge of the CD for more capacity), buffer underrun and built-in caching. Techie terms, but they are good features to have.

NTI rounded out the Titanium Suite with their BackupNOW! software that enables you to backup and quickly recover your system when a hard drive fails...and I know you have heard it a million times: Hard Drives Do Fail. This NTI program even backs up emails and important files and restores lost or deleted files, and you can automatically schedule full or partial backups.

For more information on this really cool, yet complete and inexpensive authoring and burning program visit www.ntius.com.

John Lentz