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BurnX Free is freeware of the highest caliber.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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BurnX Free: No-cost way to acheive easy CD burning on OS X, but it can't copy audio CDs


Dec. 21, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   Apple's approach of "going it alone" usually produces better software -- iPhoto and iDVD come to mind -- than you'd ever see from Microsoft for its operating system, Windows. But someone was asleep at the design table when Apple came up with its own method of burning CDs and DVDs. Instead of making this task easier, Apple's simplistic method simply makes the entire procedure confusing.
   That's why I'm a big fan of software that leapfrogs Apple's puny CD and DVD burning methods. Many OS X users might be familiar with Toast, the burner software from Roxio (www.roxio.com). It's good and costs a lot ($100). I've been using Dragon Burn for a couple of years as an alternative to Toast because I like the simpler (and easier to understand) interface of Dragon Burn. It's from www.ntius.com and costs either $40 (as a download) or $50 (as a packaged product).
   But when I added a high-speed CD burner to a refurbished iMac as a gift to our niece and her children, I skipped both Toast and Dragon Burn, installing a program named BurnX Free for CD burning. I was so impressed that I installed the same software on my new iBook for all my CD burning.
   BurnX Free (www.hernansoft.com) is freeware of the highest caliber. It works splendidly, without any confusing options, and always makes Windows-and-Mac compatible disks. (Apple's own format for data CDs produces unreadable disks on Windows PCs.)
   The author, Hernan Spaltro, is an Argentine programmer who has been developing Macintosh software for six years. Unlike many other freeware authors, Spaltro doesn't bug you for money. The only request for financial help is a "Click to donate" form on one of the site's Web pages. The software itself never nags the user.
   BurnX Free worked without a problem on four Mac OS X systems I installed it on -- my G4 tower and my wife's soccer-ball iMac in addition to my iBook and the Christmas-present iMac. Significantly, the program has no preferences -- not even a preferences menu -- so you have no chance of changing the default format and thus no way to burn a CD that your Windows-using friends and neighbors can't deal with.
   (A technical note you can skip if you want to leave out the geek stuff: For valid reasons at the time, many years ago Apple chose a way of presenting data on a CD that differed from the primitive way this was done on PCs. But the industry standard became the primitive method, so Apple's last few versions of OS X default to the Windows data CD standard when they burn CDs. BurnX Free sticks to that Windows standard method. Lest you worry that your made-on-a-Mac audio CDs or video DVDs might not be standard, the Apple disk formatting method I referred to above is for data CDs and data DVDs, not audio CDs or video DVDs. They're always made using the industry's standard formatting method.)
   Added note: A short time after I wrote this review, I discovered that BurnX Free had no provision for copying audio CDs. The CD burning method in Apple's Finder has the same liability. So I installed Dragon Burn in my iBook. BurnX Free is excellent for other kinds of burning, but I can't recommend it if you need a way to make direct copies of audio CDs.