Record now review

12 April 2005 6:17 GMT / By Chris Hall

Roxio have a long history when it comes to music software, and Record now! Is their latest ‘everything’ burner, which to put it simply, does everything that Media Player does, but looks a bit better. With Windows now looking to ship without Media Player as standard, third-party providers will want to get in there.

The main interface is divided into five tabs: home, music, data, backup and video. They contain a number of shortcuts to, some of which are duplicates. What Roxio have done here is make it simple for basic users - the music tab gives you options like ‘Audio CD for Car or Home CD Player’, so you know your music is going to appear in the right format for the player. The ‘exact copy’ option appears on every menu, just for copying easily from disc to disc.

With simple drop-down menus such as the one for drive selection, it is very difficult to go wrong. But we did find an irritating feature - the find music files. Like many other helpful music players, it offered to scan the drive and collect the music. About 20 minutes later, it delivered a huge list of audio files, 95% of which were from games and other applications. It’s sloppy, and it was frighteningly slow, although defragging the hard disk might have helped…but not by much.

The backup function will also do file backups, so you can scan for files by type and save them to CD or DVD. It can make some tasks simple, but it’s not as advanced as BackUp MyPC, also from the Roxio fold. One petty thing that raised a question was why the normal Help button is an Explain button - it’s useful to be able to question things and the Help/Explain menu is detailed and well written.

Verdict

For those who need software to create CDs and DVDs quickly and easily, this is a great option. Many, however, will question why they should pay out for something that Media Player will do for free. The duplication of applications aside, the biggest real complaint about Record now! is the exclamation mark in the title, when Corel already performed that trick ten years ago. Otherwise the software is clean, simple and does exactly what it says on the tin.

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Review Recap

Made by: Sonic
Price as reviewed: £20
The good: Simple to use
The bad: Almost unnecessary
Quick verdict: It does all it says on the tin, its simple to use, but I’ve not had any problems doing most of it with Media Player.
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