Pick just about any file format and this program provides an innovative way of storing it on CD. Burning an audio CD is a piece of cake for this tool, as is creating a video CD and picture slide shows, transferring audio from a cassette or phonograph to CD, and archiving a hard drive. A nifty CD label creator helps organize your archive as well.
As expected, audio CD burning options are comprehensive. In addition to CDA-formatted audio (playable in most CD players) a great feature converts MP3 tracks into CD audio (and vice versa) and pumps up the audio quality of MP3 files lost during compression before transferring the batch of tracks to disk. A sound-transition control allows you to fade songs out or in, add a gap between tracks, or crossfade songs (great for mixed CDs featuring live recordings). For those party-mix CDs culled from various sources, a normalizer function smoothes each track's volume levels across the CD.
Easy CD Creator 5 is much more than an audio-CD burner. A photo-sharing tool frames pictures into self-running slide-show presentations that can be backed with music. Videophiles will enjoy the video-CD capabilities. You can add any Quicktime, AVI, or series of still images to the layout interface, configure the layout, then burn the CD as an MPEG-1, viewable in compatible DVD players.
CD burning is a CPU-taxing endeavor that'll spit out flawed disks if the hardware isn't up to the task. Easy CD Creator 5 requires a 200 MHz CPU or faster, and the recommended 64 MB RAM should be doubled to avoid those annoying buffer-overrun error messages. But if your system is up to par, Easy CD Creator 5 should churn out CD after CD of beautifully formatted disks. --Eric Twelker