CD Menu Studio

One of the main goals of a computer is to make work and leisure activities more comfortable and pleasant. This is a thorough task, with various areas to target. Multimedia items, for instance, usually come stored on CDs and DVDs, fitted with clever menu for easy navigation. In this regard, CD Menu Studio is exactly what the name suggests, with a lot of power and potential under the hood.

A suggestion box pops up right from the start, telling you to import an example to get familiar. It's recommended to do so, because the diversity in customization is stunning and you might feel overwhelmed at first. There are also various templates to apply for a kick start.

Disregarding the initial advice still does not pose any accommodation problems, thanks to the effort put into visual design and functionality. Most of the space represents your canvas on which you place objects either under a general form through toolbar functions or various styles from a template browser.

Properties are in plain sight, with various settings to manage. Each object can be viewed and quickly selected from a dedicated browser, with additional support from a tab-structured panel that provides access to major elements, such as buttons, labels and background, making selection and editing a lot easier.

If the application tickles your fancy, countless minutes and probably hours are spent picking the right buttons, images, sounds and creating triggers. This is because there is hardly any aspect the application doesn't cover. You're not limited to a specific type of media content, with options to create menus for any kind of data and even USB Flash drives.

The properties panel holds a general overview of most attributes of an object. Depending on the type, a new window is brought up with more configurations and previews. Actions make no exception, with the possibility to create events for mouse clicks, hover, add tooltips and more.

These are stored in a drop down menu, with the possibility to add more than one to a single event. An impressive amount and diversity of actions are put at your disposal, such as opening a file, visiting a website, navigating to a different page, playing a sound, printing, displaying an image and a lot more.

Further adding to flexibility is file support. You can make use of nearly anything you find on your computer, like images, sounds and text, with formats worth mentioning such BMP, GIF, JPG, MP3, WAV and TXT.

Arrangement is easily done, especially because of the grid that provides a great deal of accuracy. It can be customized to include more elements simply by specifying spacing on both axes. For a more chaotic arrangement, you can disable the grid completely.

Last but not least, you need to deliver the project and test it out. Proving it means business, the application is also abundant in terms of export options, not because of too many formats, but their type can be used to enhance various media drives. As such, the result can be directly written on an optical disc, published under an ISO image file, exported to your hard disk drive or as a single executable file.

CD Menu Studio lives up to expectations and is a suitable example of a well-built, comprehensive and practical application of its kind. Abundance and diversity are amongst its top priorities, with the intuitive design and multiple templates letting anyone create impressive and thorough menus for nearly any type of content.