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Bill Machrone
Bundled vs. premium CD-creation software: Which is for you?

Bill Machrone
Contributing Editor PC Magazine
Friday, April 20, 2001
TalkBack!Add your opinion
If you have a CD-R or CD-RW drive, you got some bundled software with it to make it useful. Chances are it was Adaptec's (now Roxio Software) Easy CD Creator. It copies files. It builds audio CDs. What more do you need?

If you're a dedicated music fiend or are heavily into MP3, it could be very worth your while to pick up a copy of Easy CD Creator Platinum, the premium version. It's not cheap, but a hundred bucks isn't unreasonable for the extra features. You'd normally pay extra for the jewel case design software and for the audio cleanup software, which is ideal for transcribing noisy cassettes and LPs to CD. No, your cleanups won't sound like the studio-quality work done from master tapes, but it can make an old album that went to too many parties listenable again.

PC Magazine's review covers the features, including some specific to creating MP3s and MP3 playlists. It also includes an MPEG-1 encoder for making movies.

The platinum version has some nice features for data backup, too, although you'll find bits and pieces of the same functionality in Windows Me and the forthcoming XP. But as usual, packaged, third-party utilities have more features and feel more finished than those you get with the operating system.

Thinkmap jazzes Web navigation and adds utility
3-D Web navigation has a mostly sorry history of interfaces that are unwieldy, subfunctional, and poor performers because they require Java or other client-side software. Some of the early ones were just poorly designed, especially those abominable "shopping malls," where we were supposed to cruise down walkways and enter stores or other destinations.

Virtual reality is great for games and architectural simulations, awful for everything else.

Not every site needs a 3-D interface, but for those that do, with large amounts of information that's best navigated visually, the pickings are kind of slim. My favorite remains the offerings of Inxight Software, whose Star Tree (formerly Hyperbolic Tree) reflects both the structure and content of a site. I keep wanting to implement it on a site. One of these days…

The latest entrant to brave the innovation-in-Web-navigation waters is Thinkmap. It has considerable sophistication in the way you link things together, endowing them with physical-world properties such as magnetism, viscosity, and elasticity. Some of the items you link are nodes and others are edges. You define their interactions so that users' browsing causes associations to display visually on the screen. For example, clicking on one word could bring another forward out of a cloudy background soup; a user's interest in one topic immediately suggests another.

PC Magazine's review has more info on Thinkmap's abilities, the developer's studio, and server-side requirements. It won't take over the world, but it's interesting stuff that you should stay abreast of.

Do you find premium CD software to be a good investment? How do you feel about new navigation technology? TalkBack to me.

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