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AVSMedia products are highly recommended by "The Northern Echo", UK.
THE TROUBLE with today's disc burning suites is their sheer size.
Once disc burners did exactly that: they toasted CDs and DVDs. Now no disc burning suite is complete if it doesn't offer photo editing, sound wave manipulation, video encoding and scores of other features.
In moving to such a broad spread of features so many burners have become bloated and slow. Some are dreadful resource hogs, with cluttered interfaces and a bewildering array of features most users will never need.
If you are fed up with the "one size fits all" concept, you should take a look at the software offered by AVSMedia.
Instead of bundling all its software into one massive package, AVS has sensibly split the various disc burning features a user could want into separate applications.
So, if your interest is music there's no need to buy software that bundles movie-making and editing features.
Instead you download AVS Audio Tools and get on with the job.
Don't go thinking AVS software is somehow feature lite just because it is cheap. The Audio Tools application includes software to rip CDs, record internet radio, encode into all the popular formats, create ring tones and record directly from external sources. Everything, in fact, the serious audiophile could possibly want from a piece of burning software.
AND, if anything, the DVD and video tool-sets are even more impressive. Using the Video Tools you can capture footage from a camcorder, edit it and burn it to a DVD, an iPod, or a PSP. It is even possible to "rip" sound-tracks from DVD movies for listening to in the car or an MP3 player.
The editing application is a cinch to use – just drag a mouse along the timeline to select the portions of video to leave on the cutting room floor – and the built-in encoder is fast and efficient.
AVS DVD Copy does what it says on the box: copies DVDs into various different formats. It coped very well with a number of discs and the ripper was blazingly fast – copying and compressing a full dual-layer disc to fit a normal DVDR in less than ten minutes even on a modest Intel Celeron laptop.
This software is perfect for a movie lover who likes to take their favourite films along when travelling.
After struggling with disc burning bloatware switching to AVS is like using a scalpel to work with files rather than bludgeoning them to death with a sledgehammer.
Best of all, every AVS application can be downloaded from the internet as trial software.
Many of the features are only marginally crippled (the DVD copier adds a watermark etc), so you can give them a thorough work-out before taking the plunge.
AVS even offers a completely free software DVD player available from its website so a visit is highly recommended. The player is easy to use and can play DVD, VCD, DiVX, raw MPEG and ripped DVD files.
Although it may not be a familiar name, I guarantee you'll find lots to like in AVS software. Why not drop by the web-site at http://www.avsmedia.com/.
Written by Nigel Burton, "The Northern Echo"
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