CDR Tools Front End

Although Flash drives nowadays invaded the market of storage devices, pushing CDs and DVDs into obsolescence, these are still used and won't easily give up the fight. Used to deliver licensed programs, games, music and videos, they also serve as a means of storing your data, with applications like CDR Tools Front End being designed to help you burn files to CDs and more.

The application comes with two components that let you carefully arrange files and folders in a preferred order and deploy them on a CD. These run independently and with no quick access button from either of the main windows.

You'll be able to accomplish a little more than just writing data to a CD. The application is equipped with features that let you create ISO files you might later on want to burn. Sadly, there's no function that reads created ISO files so you'll need to look for such an app too if you're using it locally. On the other hand, you can burn content of and image to a CD.

The creation and file selection window is the same for both image building and CD burning. You quickly realize it's not your average CD burner, packed with some specialized options as well. However, these are not selected by default for safety and include generating several extensions like JOLIET FS, Rock Ridge FS, TRANS. TBL, or HSF.

Further on the list of requirements, you can choose whether or not the CD to be bootable, pick a single folder to burn or a path list, as well as the possibility to create an ISO file while also specifying a target path.

You'll also be able to extract audio tracks from a CD to keep your music collection on your computer, or use the burner utility to create data, audio or mixed CDs. The process itself does not take long to complete, whether you created and image or CD.

As mentioned above, there's another component the application comes with, namely Visual ISO. This is a simple utility with the help of which you can create path lists. While in the creation window of the burner, path files can be used to quickly gather data and how to be arranged on the CD.

You can create and arrange folders and populate them with files and directories you drag over the main window or import with the dedicated function.

All things considered, CDR Tools Front End might not be amongst the top CD burners, especially because it lacks support for DVDs, but for simple tasks in which CDs suffice, it gets the job properly done. It's easy enough to use and with a little effort, arrangement suits your needs or tastes with the Visual ISO component as well as the various extensions available.