Campquake Senate

I don't mind paying for a superior product.

CDs, DVDs, Dual-layer DVDs....

Oh, and how do you defeat DRM?

Ashampoo Burning studio has been one of the best for me imho, and so has the whole Professional Roxio Media Creator Suite

I use Alcohol 120%.

I poo poo Roxio. It has the potential to hose a system and often breaks on its own. I'd heard lots of complaints about the DirectCD and would recommend to anyone using Roxio to uninstall it. Perhaps things have improved, but at least up to Easy Media Creater (EMC) version 8 it was crapware. I haven't seen any suckers, errr customers buy EMC9 yet. Perhaps they heard the message?

Rico, is this under Vista?

I've been happy with the bundled Nero 6 Burning that came with my drive. Or came with someone's drive! heh! I can't recall where I got my install CD, but it's original OEM with a code. But it's been working fine. I just made a home video DVD with it last night in fact. It's fast and reliable which is why I kept it installed.

As for Copy Protection (CP)/DRM, I haven't met much in the way of Music CDs that stopped me from preforming an exact copy of the Disc. Although, lately, I've been importing .WAV files into Adobe Audition so that I can write CD-Text labels to the tracks and then burning the WAV's on to CD-R media. I've been a bit anal wanting to read the title and artist on my CD's in the car changer. And so far, only 1 CD came with text on it. The rest I had to burn with text.

CP on DVD's is a different story. I use DVD Shrink (Free! Make donation if you're nice.) to break the DeCSS encryption and burn the results to a DVD. Legally, 'paid-for' software can't legally break the encryption. So you gotta thank "DVD John" for cracking DeCSS and making the decryption source code GPL. DVD Shrink is mostly a 2 step process. But you can also select what will be available on your new DVD disc to reduce the size to a 4.7 GB DVD if you don't have any 8.5 GB DL's floating around. DVD-R's, though not fully supported by standalone players, has the widest support of all the "DVD+-" media.

Taiyo Yuden, I've read, make the best media period. They invented the CD-R media dye process which Taiyo Yuden still holds the patents for. They sell directly under two brand names, either as "That's" and "Taiyo Yuden" - but they also manufacturing for other brand names such such as TDK, Sony and Maxell. Stick under Taiyo Yuden's family of disc's and you're sure to have good media. There's also slightly more expensive versions of their media if your printer can print directly to the disc. Otherwise it's all pretty much the same thing.

My feelings are the same about Roxio...
Nero, oddly enough is becoming the same bloated POS as Roxio became although.
For Vista, you need the latest version (7 reloaded, IIRC) which absolutely LOVES to take over every file association on your PC in favor on their worthless bloated player that takes 15 seconds to start ...that is when it actually starts and doesn't crash!

I've had mixed experiences with Nero though, on my Vista PC, I unselected all file associations and it works great. However on my XP PC at work, I unselected the associations also, but it still took over everything.
And the worst part, uninstalling it then leaves all of your file types with no associated player.
Talk about pissin' a guy off!

I too use DVD shrink, for DVD CP which if you have Nero installed, will burn the DVD's for you without having to open all of the files up. Occasionally I'll have some trouble with copying some DVDs even with DVD Shrink, in which case a search of their forum for the movie you're trying to copy usually gives you an answer of how to do it. Some DVD's require SlySoft AnyDVD to be running to remove the other protection on the discs.

As for DRM on audio, I haven't dabbled much into that. Generally if I have problems ripping a CD, I just download the disk from someone who's already defeated the DRM. isohunt.com, torrentspy.com + bitlord is a good place to find full albums.

As far as burning goes I use DeepBurner (free) http://www.deepburner.com

and I always use TDK media

as for "backing up" your DVD's I use dvdshrink to copy the folders off and then I use HandBrake to encode to a media file for storage....


play around and find your combos