I've recommended Ashampoo's Burning Studio software for CD and DVD burning software and used it personally for quite some time. Ron sent me an email this week, which may have brought my recommendation into question:
Hi Dave!
First, nice review/tutorial on one of my favorites, Roboform.
Now as to Burning Studio...I had BS 2007 on one of my boxes for a while without ever using it. I've been working with Nero so long, I can burn in my sleep with it. Recently, I took the same set of .wav files that I'd run through Cool Edit Pro and burned two audio disks. One was with Burning Studio, the other with Nero. Curiously, the BS disk played back at a slightly lower volume and somewhat diminished frequency response than the Nero disk. This occurred in three different physical players, car and home. Without going into great detail, I confirmed the impression by playing the disks in Adobe Audition which verified a slight difference. No real distortion was noted on either disk, just a difference in output/response. YMMV
The verdict: I uninstalled Burning Studio. I agree it has a small footprint and is easy on the CPU cycles, but I have plenty to spare.
I'll keep using Nero for the sake of consistency.
Test setup:
P4 2.53 Gb CPU
1.5 Gb RAM
XP Pro SP2
Nero 6.6.1.15
Ashampoo Burning Studio 2007
Taiyo Yuden 650 Mb media
Keep up the good work!
Ron
I'm not very familiar with audio software myself, but I attempted to reproduce what Ron had experienced. I used one mp3 and created one CD each with both Ashampoo Burning Studio 7 and Nero 7. I then ripped each CD to a wav file using Acoustica Audio Converter Pro. Using one file and one program to rip back to wav file format should leave the burning program and the encoder used in each as the only variable.
I wasn't having much luck with Adobe Audition, as it's a very powerful program. I contacted Ron and asked if he had any screen shots showing what he had observed:
Hi Dave!
I'm having a little trouble reproducing the same effects I first noticed. Audition is a handful, to be sure! I usually stay with the older Cool Edit Pro 2.1 or GoldWave or Audacity for those kinds of comparisons. Tried a couple of screen shots, but they don't show much.
In retrospect, it's not really a failing on the part of the Ashampoo program to produce slightly different outputs from other programs. After all, it does a nice job with DVD's as I recall; hard to argue with that. I only brought it up because I admire the work you put into the newsletter and thought you might be interested in the observation.
Thanks for the follow up. Sorry I'm not much help.
With kind regards,
Ron
After tinkering around with Audition for quite a while I came up with the following:
(click for full size)
What you are looking at is a waveform representing approximately 1/10 of one second of a song. The waveform on the top is from the Ashampoo file and the bottom is the Nero file. The Nero file appears to be slightly (1 or 2 db) and the peak indicated by the arrow. It also appears that the ashampoo file may be slightly longer (time added). I would attribute this to the encoder used in the program. I wrote Ron back to show him my results:
Yup, that looks about right. Between the levels and the encoder (good catch! that makes sense.), the differences show a little better. TBH, most users would be fine with ABS. I'm just thoroughly used to Nero. I will admit Roxio's current Easy Media Creator 9 is pretty slick, but compared to Nero, the footprint resembles a 300-lb. gorilla's! The code's a little messy, but it works as well as other Roxio products.
I know audio (just not audio software). The average human finds a 3db difference barely noticeable. Based on what I've observed I'm going to retain my recommendation for Ashampoo Burning Studio 7 for most users as it's a small, simple to use program. Nero is a great program also, but it may seem a bit complicated for the novice user. If you consider yourself an above average user then I would recommend Nero.
I'd like to thank Ron for taking the time to originally share his discovery, and continuing the discussion through several emails. Thanks Ron!