A recent review of the freebie CD/DVD burning application – CDBurnerXP – led a number of readers to offer their views on burner applications. A particular free favorite amongst readers, and one I’ve run with on and off over the years is – ImgBurn.
Since there’s no better time like the present, and driven by curiosity as to why readers found ImgBurn so compelling – I revisited this application and ran with it for several days. Glad I did.
I’ll jump ahead here – directly to my conclusion. ImgBurn is a superior CD/DVD burning application. No hesitation – this application ROCKS.
The following screen capture illustrates the wide range of application settings available. For those of us who are conversant with all of the ins and outs, this is very advantageous. An average user might well skip by these selections. Still, the options are there and, jumping into the Settings menu offers a terrific learning opportunity for those who are interested .
Ez Mode Picker GUI shown. As you can see, I’ve chosen to write an image file to disc. Writing image files to DVD, is the most common use I have for burner software.
Since I’m burning to a rewritable disc – ImgBurn has given me a “just in time” warning – saving me from what could have been a critical error – overwriting valuable data. It’s not likely that I would have saved important data on a DVD+RW but, that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t happen.
So, the warning popup as shown in the following screen capture – is absolutely necessary, in my view.
Given the go ahead, the application got right down to work – erased the disc; burned the ISO image; and verified the data. Total time to completion – 4 minutes 18 seconds (586 MB).
I do agree with regular reader Muncher W., that we could do without the blast of celebratory music. 
In a comparable test (in conjunction with this review test), running CDBurnerXP, which I reviewed several days ago, that application, including a manual erasure of the disc’s contents (* more on that in a moment), took 4 minutes and 10 seconds. An inconsequently time difference.
* If you are using a DVD-RW (as I did for these tests) which already contains data – CDBurnerXP will not warn you that you are about to overwrite that data. Bad! Very Bad!
As an expert user, I make it a practice to always read a rewritable disc before using that disc on a new job but, an average user might easily be burned (no pun intended), if that simple step is not followed. Better, I think, that a burner application should shout out a warning.
While CDBurnerXP, with its simple straightforward GUI and limited choices, is a very fine application for those who are relatively new to CD/DVD burning – the lack of a warning has the potential to cause havoc.
The chances may be slim – but, they are real, nevertheless.
The usual offer on installation. As always – caution is the byword.
System requirements: Windows XP, Vista and Win 7.
Download at: ImgBurn
A portable version is available at: The Portable Freeware Collection.
Bill Mullins' Weblog - Tech Thoughts 