geekEleet

 Today I set out to burn an audio CD.  Wait, did he just say audio CD?  He must have meant mp3 CD.  Nope, I meant audio CD.  Good old 80 minute, 17 song audio CD.  Don’t worry about the why.  Worry about the how. 

The first challenge I faced was getting disks.  Apparently the only type that I stock in my home are DVDs.  So I trekked down to the local Wal-Mart and grabbed a spindle of 50.  Sadly, they were nearly double the price of the same sized spindle of DVDs.  Not cool.

Now, I have Roxio installed, but I’m getting tired of it bloating my system with useless features, so I set out to find a new burning app.  The obvious place to find such a thing is LifeHacker.com, and a quick search brought me to the Free Replacements for Paid Tools as voted by the readers.  In the article, readers suggested their favorite burning tools as a replacement for Nero - another pile of bloatware crap.  The winner?  CDBurnerXP.

A quick browse of their website showed me some screenshots of the tool and gave me a good impression of what it could do.  Here is the lowdown:

Key Features:

• burn all kinds of discs
• audio-CDs with or without gaps between tracks
• burn and create ISO files
• data verification after burning process
• create bootable discs
• multi-language interface
• bin/nrg → ISO converter, simple cover printing and much more!
• Operating Systems: Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista

Excellent I thought.  Audio CDs with or without gaps!  Too good to be true.  What the hell.  I downloaded and installed it.  Installation was easy and painless.  The application interface is relatively intuitive.  Even though it’s called CDBurnerXP, it runs great on Vista.  I loaded up the audio tracks, burned the disk and then ran it through the test.  Success!  It plays in a cd player. 

Second test, an ISO of XMBC LiveCD.  Selected the file, clicked burn.  Waited.  Tried to boot from disk.  Didn’t work.  Excellent.  The problem was with XBMC, not the burn.  I can safely say that CDBurnerXP is a very acceptable replacement for the bloatware pushed out with burners these days.  It’s refreshing to see free products that are 100x better than a competing retail product.  Check out their awards page to see just how great this utility is. 

Download it today!