Editor's Review - Nero 7 Premium Reloaded
Nero 7 is an all-in-one CD/DVD recording application suite and more.
The installation process is designed to fit everyone's needs, whether you are a beginner, by choosing a typical installation, or you are an advanced user, by just selecting the components you need or a full install. The last installation step activates Nero Scout and allows you to select Nero to be associated with image, video, and audio files in order to ease access to Nero Home Media Manager. Nero Scout has integrated a brand new component called Nero Search, which provides quick searching capabilities on your computer or on the Internet.
Once the package is installed, you can choose to run your applications independently from Nero Home or from Nero StartSmart control center. The Nero 7 package contains Nero StartSmart, Burning ROM, Nero Express, Nero Vision, Nero BackItUp, Nero Cover Designer, Nero Wave Editor, Nero SoundTrax, Nero ShowTime, Nero MediaHome, Nero Recode, Nero PhotoSnap, Nero PhotoSnap Viewer, Nero ImageDrive, Nero BurnRights, Nero ProductSetup, Nero CD-DVD Speed, Nero DriveSpeed, and Nero InfoTool.
Nero Home is a multimedia manager that allows you to record or playback all types of media images, movies, and music. Similar to Windows Media Center, Nero Home is tool, which manages your entire multimedia collection and features, advanced playback capabilities, as well as capturing video from any source like TV cards, graphic cards, camcorder, VCR, or webcams (composite/S-video).
Nero StartSmart is the main Nero suite launcher, which contains shortcuts to all Nero applications and services. You can select any task and Nero StartSmart will automatically start the appropriate application in order to perform your desired operations.
Nero Burning ROM is the key feature of the Nero suite. Well known for its CD/DVD burning capabilities, now Nero Burning ROM also features support for Blu-ray disk data recording.
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Nero Express is actually a simplified version of Nero burning ROM, since it has been redesigned to increase speed, efficiency, ease of use, and to keep the performance standards of Nero Burning ROM.
Nero Vision allows you to capture video from external sources and create DVD-Video, VCD, SVCD, and miniDVDs. Among its options, we may mention the capability of creating animated menus for DVD-Video: 3D menu scenes, translations between menus and video clips.
Nero BackItUp helps you keep your files and folders secure from damage because of system crashes, power failure, etc. In case you want to backup entire partitions, the backup process will take a little longer than other backup applications, such as Acronis True Image. It took 17 min, 40 sec. to backup a 35Gb hard drive which had 7.23 Gb occupied.
Nero Cover Designer allows you to customize your disk cases. You can choose to create your own disk covers or you can use one of the dozens of templates available.
Nero Wave Editor provides you with recording and editing tools for AIF, MP2, WMA, MP4, WAVE, and NWF audio file formats. You can record sound from multiple sources, like CD, Line In, Microphone, etc.
Nero SoundTrax is a professional audio mixing utility. It supports 7.1 channel surround real time editing and mixing. It transfers to your PC old tapes, CDs, and even vinyl records.
Nero ShowTime is a fully featured multimedia player. You can play all types of video and audio files, including DVDs with subtitles and frame capture capabilities.
With Nero Recode you can recode non-copy protected movies (DVD-9 to DVD-5) to a CDR/RW, DVD+/-R or a single DVD+R DL disc in DVD-Video format (DVD-9 to DVD-9). It includes MP4 support for iPod encoding. You can import a DVD, select video and audio quality, get subtitles, or even recode it to 8cm DVD (1,4 Gb), DVD5 (4,7 Gb) or custom size video. Video files can be previewed in the internal viewer.
Nero PhotoSnap is not a very impressive image-editing tool. It can open a large array of image files and it features many effects such as image sharpening, color balance, lens distortions, rotate, redeye removal, etc. On the other hand, you cannot draw, add text, insert shapes, or convert images.
Nero ImageDrive is a virtual drive mounter, which supports integration into Windows Explorer as well as up to two virtual drives.
The interface is very well designed and it provides quick access to all Nero features like data, audio, or video CD burning. Converting audio CDs to audio files, encoding audio files with a large variety of extensions, copying CDs, backing up files, restoring back-ups, burning images, or erasing CDs are very accessible as well. You can also change the way Nero looks by choosing a skin of your liking. All usual file formats are supported.
There is also an extremely useful selection of favorite applications you can choose from, such as making data DVD's, making mp3 or WMA DVDs, copying DVDs, backing up files, restoring back-ups, and burning images. The tools provided allow you to check drive speed, set burning rights for different users, and obtain system information.
Pluses: CD/DVD overburning, some nice utility tools such as system information, test CD/DVD drives for transfer rates, DAE quality, access/seek times, CPU usage, burst rates, etc., as well as controlling the cover, drive speed, and CD/DVD label manager. Nero 7 also supports burning of short Lead Outs. Thus, one can save up to 80 seconds when burning a CD/DVD, and has only 12 Mb of free storage location.
A great feature of Nero is InCD. An application which allows you to read discs written in MRW format on systems that do not support MRW as well as discs written in a UDF format that are not natively supported by your operating system. InCD is a drag-and-drop writing utility, which provides DVD-RAM, Blu-ray support, and DVD-RW quick format.
Drawbacks / flaws: Nero BackItUp lacks incremental and differential backup options, as well as the fact that it cannot create a full backup of the primary partition because the file system is in use.
In conclusion: Burning CD/DVD-Video, Photo, Data, Audio, or BackUp files, as well as mounting images. All utilities integrated in an extremely comprehensive and reliable package. A few minor flaws, but overall it's an excellent program!
