Astroburn

Burn everything from CD's to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray

With the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats becoming increasingly dominant, it's important to have a burner that can handle them all.

The problem with most new burners is that they come at a cost and Astroburn is no exception. The full version will cost you a few dollars but this demo allows you to perform basic burning of small files. Unlike big name programs such as Nero, Astroburn is one of those programs that's easy to use and allows you to carry out a wide array of functions. The software is compatible with Windows 2000 to Windows 11.

You can burn discs, create and record ISO, copy discs, erase rewritable disks and create music CDs. The interface is incredibly stripped down featuring a drag and drop burning process that's easy to use. The fact that the interface is so basic should not give the impression that it's not particularly powerful though.

However, it doesn't always burn as it should do. Normally CD burners automatically optimise burning for the speed of your drive but it seems that Astroburn requires you to configure this yourself. If you don't define the right speed , the buffer is too slow and you'll suffer from the dreaded "buffer underrun" problem. The support page is useless because it simply gives you a phone number for technical assistance rather than an FAQ.

Nevertheless, if you need a simple solution to burning HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and don't mind paying a bit for the pleasure, Astroburn is a worthy option.