Farba Research Product Review

Copyright 1999 Farba Research All Rights Reserved

Rebuttals may be sent to Rebuttals@FarbaResearch.com
This product review is strictly the opinion of the reviewer, who is not necessarily a Farba Research employee. 






 

    Product: 
  Easy CD Creatortm v3.5

 

    Category: 
  CD recorder software

 

    Manufacturer: 
  Adaptec, Inc.

 

    Vendor Website: 
  
       http://www.adaptec.com/   

 

    Rating: 
   demented but functional

 

    Reviewer: 
  E. Nicholas Cupery

 

    Last Update: 
  31 March 99




 
 




Introduction

Yeah, well, this one's lucky it only got a yellow rating instead of red.  The
only thing saving it is the fact that it does actually make functional CDs.
Make sure your blood pressure medication is up to snuff before trying this
thing.

 
 




Pros



 
 




Cons



 
 




Discussion


Easy CD Creator generates numerous warnings that are totally
undocumented.  These warnings have names such as "TrackWriter warning T764E".
The warning number seems to always start with an upper-case "T", and it seems
to always be a "TrackWriter" warning (with exactly that mixture of case), even
though the term TrackWriter is apparently not claimed as a trademark by anyone,
Adaptec in particular.  Adaptec Technical Support has admitted to me that 
Adaptec has
no idea in the world what these warning messages mean, and also that 
Adaptec has no intention of ever finding out and documenting them. 
(I was told that these warnings are being generated within the old code that
Adaptec inherited when it purchased Corel Corporation's CDR software product
long ago.  Furthurmore, I was told that Adaptec currently has a project to 
rewrite the CDR software from "the ground up".  Both this explanation and this 
approach seem quite reasonable to me.) 


Easy CD Creator resets the recording speed to 2x 
every time the program is run.  This is obnoxious to 
those of us with reliable 4x (or up) recorders!  Unless we remember to reset 
this every time, our CDR operations take twice as long as necessary.  
(Note that there is a user-settable recording speed in a dialog box found under
Tools/CD-RecorderProperties/General that, for some unknown reason, seems to
just be ignored.) 


Easy CD Creator resets the test-before-writing option 
every time the program is run.  This is obnoxious
to those of us with reliable recorders!  Unless we remember to reset this 
every time, our CDR operations take twice as long as necessary. 


Easy CD Creator resets the option to close the session but leave the disk "open"
when finished every time the program is run.  This is 
obnoxious to those of us making audio CDs!  Unless we remember 
to reset this every time, we end up creating a disk that will not play
in some audio players. 


Easy CD Creator categorically ejects the disk when 
finished.  This is not only obnoxious, it is dangerous!  Given that no 
reasonable person would stand around and actually watch this lengthy process,
bad things can happen if there is a small child (or cat) in the room.  In an
office setting, bad things can happen if someone walks by a tower case.  It is
simply not reasonable to categorically expose a fragile disk drive tray to
these external elements. 


When creating an audio CD, Easy CD Creator shows the amount of playing time
so far, as well as the amount of free time left, as wave files are dragged into
and out of the bottom window.  This would be a very nice feature if it actually
worked, but the time calculations become wildly erroneous if one does 
anything other than simply add wave files to this window. 


Easy CD Creator generates bogus "files have changed" warnings, while 
preparing to write a data CD, if the dataset is composed of a large (about 5000)
number of individual files. (This would be a bigger deal if it weren't for the
fact that generating a CDR with this many files is so slow that 
few would be likely to attempt it a second time anyway.) 



Conclusion


Obnoxious is the word.  It seems perfectly obvious to me that this is one of 
those products that does not actually get used very often by the person or 
persons responsible for its behavior.

 
 






Copyright 1999  Farba Research  All Rights Reserved 








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