I started using Nero Burning ROM ever since I had a CD burner. Nero used to be the best but after a few major updates, it has turned into a bloatware that has a larger installation footprint, comes with many unnecessary features that are not used by end users, or just generally use more system resources than necessary, while offering little or no benefit to its users. You might be surprised that until today I am still stuck with Nero because I am a person that doesn’t simply change stuff if the current one is working well. Of course during Nero installation, I pretty much uncheck most of the stuff that I don’t need so I get only the Nero burning tool. As for the free Nero 9 Essentials, you can forget about it because it can only burn data, copy disc, erase and analyze disc.
Nero Alternative
Recently I got my Dell Studio One 1909 desktop and I did a clean Windows 7 installation because I didn’t like all the software that was pre-installed. I felt like Windows 7 was loading a gazillion third party software that I probably never use! Anyway I was doing some testing and wanted to burn some ISO images to CD. I used a portable and small tool called BurnCDCC to burn the ISO image and after finished burning, the disc shows that its blank! Then I tried using MagicISO and UltraISO, both also failed to burn the disc. I panicked for a moment thinking that I might have a faulty CD/DVD burner (HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GA11N A102) on a NEW computer!

Then I tried installing the latest version of Nero 9 and it worked flawlessly. After testing a few more disc burning software, I now realized that NOT ALL CD burning software can support all CD/DVD writers.

The software below couldn’t detect my drive as a writer.

  • DeepBurner v1.9.0.228
  • MagicISO v5.5.0281
  • UltraISO Premium v9.3.6.2750
  • CDBurnerXP Portable v4.2.3.1110
  • BurnCDCC v2.00a
  • DeepBurner v1.9.0.228

    • I was very surprised and disappointed at the same time to know that the popular MagicISO and UltraISO didn’t support the DVD writer on my Dell computer. You might have heard of CDBurnerXP and DeepBurner before because they are free but they too don’t work on my drive. BurnCDCC not able to work is acceptable because it is outdated (last update was 4 years ago).

    Other than Nero that worked on my computer, here are 3 portable disc burning software that I recommend to use. There are a lot of disc burning software, tons of them but unfortunately not many that are portable and free at the same time. I prefer portable tools so that the software doesn’t need to drop files on other locations and also add extra entries to the registry.

    1. StarBurn
    free nero starburn
    - StarBurn is very impressive because it has tons of features such as burning data, audio and video. Other than that, it can build ISO images, grab audio CD and make them into MP3, compress WAV to MP3. There are 2 versions of StarBurn, free and paid. The only difference are you don’t get to record to remote CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD burner over TCP/IP and no support.
    [ Download StarBurn ]

    2. CDRTFE (cdrtools Frontend)
    cdrtools frontend nero alternative
    - CDRTFE is a frontend for the cdrtools (cdrecord, mkisofs, readcd, cdda2wav), Mode2CDMaker and VCDImager. This is one my favorite because both cdrtools and frontend are actively being developed, so the chances of supporting a lot of disc writers are pretty high.
    [ Download CDRTFE ]

    3. InfraRecorder
    free download infrarecorder
    - This tool is not being actively developed but it worked on my dvd writer. It can create custom data, audio and mixed-mode projects, supports recording to dual-layer DVDs, erase rewritable discs using four different methods, record disc images, and etc.
    [ Download InfraRecorder ]

    All this 3 software are free and portable which means they can all go into my USB flash drive. Very useful to test if its a drive, software, or “user problem” when my customer complains that they cannot write a disc or the disc couldn’t read after burning. Do let me know if I missed any “Free & Portable” disc burning software…

    [tags]starburn, nero, infrarecorder, cdrtools, magiciso[/tags]