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Sonic MyDVD 5 Studio Deluxe
As a callow assistant editor at my first trade show (the late and occasionally lamented intermedia), I stuck close to the EMedia (then CD-ROM Professional) booth, hawking the magazine, tongue-in-cheek, as "all things to some people, and nothing to others." In a way, that was more true then than it is now-if that makes any sense-since the 1995-vintage CD-ROM Professional, though beginning to broaden its purview and diversify its appeal, was a stuck-in-the-stacks, niche-within-a-niche, library-oriented publication, exploring the minutiae of mass-database applications for CD-ROM and the hardware that produced and played them.
Perhaps echoing the spirit of those bygone days, two recent reviews by Ron Miller have used similar "all things to all people" terms to criticize two long-standing CD recording tools, Roxio's Easy CD Creator and Ahead's Nero. In recent versions they've attempted to expand their appeal, both in terms of versatility-adding DVD authoring capability, in the main-and offering a surfeit of features for both the consumer and professional. The problem, Miller argued, came in the tools' tendency to spread themselves too thin, and offer too little to too many. That's putting it in terms more dramatic than Miller did-neither of these tools came up all that short, and both are powerful applications, particularly on the recording side, and admirable ones in their first efforts to throw DVD recording into the mix. But again, in the name of pro/am fusion, he argued that their identities aren't as well-integrated as they might be, and having worked with both tools, I agree.
That said, versions 6 of both tools (the latest, in both instances) have redefined the parameters for software previously known as "premastering" or "CD recording" tools. The old terms simply don't fit anymore, since so much of what these tools do pertains to DVD. Both tools also broke that new ground in much the same way, adding first-generation DVD capabilities to tools well-heeled in CD creation. And while both tools (Nero in particular) can stake a reasonable claim to pro capabilities on the CD recording side, they approach DVD from a decidedly consumer standpoint.
Then there's Sonic, who invented DVD authoring "for the rest of us" with MyDVD, and arguably reinvented "the rest of us" as potential DVD authors,...