Burning your discs is no longer a problem. There are lots of applications on the market perfectly capable of performing a good job in this sense. There are the minor slips, but generally you can find a good tool. And if you have Windows Vista installed you can always use the built-in tool provided by Microsoft.

Oront comes to enlarge the list of available burners on the market. Contrary to the expectations for the Premium version of the software the price is not so "premium" and the price tag reads $35, a noticeable decrease compared to the previous version that costs $39.95.

The features available in this version are almost complete and the application is equipped with burning tools for data, audio files, DVDs, MP3s as well as a disc management tools and an instrument for creating images (ISO format). The burning capabilities are not restricted to CD and DVD writing and extend to newer technologies such as Blu-ray discs and HD DVDs.

There is no longer the problem with returning to a previous menu as in the earlier version and the solution adopted involves opening each tool in a different window. Of course this will crowd your taskbar, but it is much better than restarting the application in order to choose a different tool to use.

Disc erasing options can be found in four separate places: Data Burning tool, Audio Burning tool, MP3 Burning and DVD Burning tool. However similar the erasing options are, I noticed that you cannot use the disc eraser in Audio Burning for wiping a DVD video. The operation will simply not work or say that the job is done after only a few seconds.

Regarding the quick erase operation, a very strange thing happened. During the tests, the feature behaved in a very weird manner and after notifying that the operation was complete it ejected the disc. When inserting it back again and accessing the drive I was very surprised to see that the previously written session was not erased completely and the files were still visible (and the space on disc was displayed as occupied in all the file managers I checked, including Total Commander, EF Commander and Windows Explorer).

Accessing them resulted in all sorts of errors, indeed, but after an erase of a rewritable disc, be it a quick one, the files should no longer be visible to the user as their names are the ones deleted and the space should appear as free as the Disc Managing Tool clearly stated. I tried a full erase, which after a second or two after the start, announced me that the disc had been successfully erased (and yet Windows Explorer showed differently and Oront would not burn the disc because it was not empty).

The burning does not take long (102MB were saved to disc in a matter of about one minute). And the window will display the speed of the burning process and the elapsed time. Adding the files and folders to disc is a drag and drop job, but you should be aware of what kind of disc you want to create as for creating: DVD video, Audio or MP3 (MP3 is equal to data burning so the option is a bit useless here).

Testing the DVD burning abilities of the software worked fine and nicely. It took a little longer for the job to complete (about 20 minutes) but the operation was a success. All the DVD players I put the result against were able to play the Oront created DVD video.

I can't say the same about the audio burning part of the application. WMA and WAV files were agreed by the software. With OGG and MP3 formats however, an allergenic reaction took place and the files could not be appended. It is very strange for the MP3 format not to work as it is one of the most popular in the world.

The version reviewed above is the 2.1.2 stable. In the 2.1.3 beta I must say that I was pretty impressed at the beginning by the behavior. The first testing of the Audio Burning tool allowed me to add all stated audio formats and more, I succeeded in adding a FLAC file, also. The second time I was not that lucky and on adding an OGG a nasty DLL error occurred, but at least the MP3s were added just fine. However, the erasing issue stands in the beta, too.

The Good

The application is very easy to handle and the explorer interface really makes things work faster. You simply have to browse to the desired file and drag and drop it in a different window.

Burning the DVD video files is completed successfully.

The Bad

There are a lot more issues to be solved than I originally expected. I am still surprised about the lack of support for MP3 and OGG audio files. They simply would not drop in the disc window. Restarting the computer does not solve the problems just like restarting the application does not either.

The erasing issues should not be a problem, however, it seems that Oront has to deal with it.

The Truth

I would have expected this kind of issues from an earlier version of the release, but with each version any application is heading to a full fledged state that should give it stability.

Considering the list of baddies mentioned above, I would say that the price is still too much to pay for a troublesome application like Oront Burning Kit Premium.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: