Nero six-zero fiddles while ROM burning

A LITTLE while ago, I got a copy of Nero 6.0 to review. Being a loyal user of Nero 5.5.a, I was looking forward to the changes this update brought.

To be honest, I was a little underwhelmed at first, Nero 6 didn't appear to change much. That is a good thing though. This version mainly keeps the good, adds a few features, and polishes many of the things that needed it. Recently, the firm released version 6.3, a large update, providing more support for AMD64, HyperThreading, and a bunch of usability improvements. The first two should be transparent to the user, but the last one is obvious only if you used 6.0 a lot.

Lets start out with Nero SmartStart. This is a little program to ease new users into the world of CD burning. You can pick a task through a list of bright icons and associated shiny things. You can choose between such things as audio, video, data and other commonly used formats. Curiously, there is a separate place to choose whether the disk is a CD or DVD. On the up side, there is a "favorites" menu where you can mark the three or four options you commonly use.

SmartStart is one of the more usable of the "easy startup" features I've seen lately. For the first month or so that I used the program, I didn't crave more control, the dumbed down version worked OK for me. This is not a criticism, in fact as far as descendants of "Microsoft Clippy" go, it is high praise. After about a month, this feeling of non-annoyance wore off, and I am back to the usual direct running of Nero.

Nero remains probably the best CD burning program out there for casual use. It supports almost every format you can think of, from DVD-ROM to Audio CD to CD-Extra. There is also a bunch of CD formats that you have never heard of, and will almost certainly never use, but the bunch is supported.

Users of older Nero versions will be instantly familiar with the layout. Once you pick a format on the left hand pane, you get a tabbed set of options on the right to control all of the minutiae. If you set the options once, you will rarely have to change them, and new users can safely ignore them until there is a problem. Just click "New" and away you go.

Off to the classic four pane CD burning screen - one half CD compilation, the other half file system. Once again, no surprises, just drag the files from the file system into the compilation, and press burn. The dialog box is roughly the same as the "new compilation" dialogue with a couple of features removed. If you set everything right the first time, you can just press burn again, and away you go.

One of the major visible changes to Nero 6 is the progress dialogue screen. In the new and improved version, this screen lists the progress notes while the disk is burning rather than when it is done. The only problem here is the information, while useful, is sort of pointless. Once you hit burn, you are a spectator. If something is going wrong, and you hit cancel, you've just trashed a disk. If you let it go, you've just trashed a disk.

Three bars show you a graphical indication of what is happening. Two bar graphs give you a readout of burn or verification percentage done, and the last shows the amount of buffer remaining. All three have a numeric indicator beside them to you don't have to guess that "this long" is actually 57%. For me, this screen alone is worth the upgrade.

All is not rosy, there are a few rough edges. The selection process for DVD vs CD is clunky, and if you choose wrongly, you can't change it without starting over. There is also no text under the icons, so if you want to know what the scissors button does, you have to put the mouse over it until the tooltips pop up. No way to figure out what button brings up the cover designer without a lot of guesswork. If you think that there is nothing badly wrong with Nero 6, you're right, everything is better.

With a little experimentation, even a novice should be able to figure it out how to do most everything Nero supports with only a little pain. Once you make it past the novice stage, there are enough tools and extras to keep you busy for days, if you want.

For the person with an abject fear of computers, the plague that is Roxio would probably be a better match. If you need control, and the ability to do just about everything, you probably want Gear Pro. How else are you going to set the copy control permissions on DVD-9s? For that large middle ground, Nero 6 is hard to beat, and I personally use it for most of my CD burning jobs. It scores 7/10, what's missing is only a little more polish and the stupidly powerful high-end features of Gear. µ