BurnAware 9.0 burning software released

BurnAware is a burning software for the Windows operating system that is available as a free, premium and professional version.

While I don't burn that much data anymore to discs using programs like ImgBurn or BurnAware, I use them occasionally to burn disc images or media to disc, especially when I burn media for others or want to watch videos on the TV and not the computer.

BurnAware 9.0 is the latest version of the popular burning software for Windows.

It supports CD, DVD and Blu-Ray discs and all the operations that you would expect from a program of its kind. This includes writing files to discs, burning disc images, creating bootable discs, or erasing rewritable discs.

BurnAware Free

The program displays all of its options in its interface on start, and that screen acts as a launcher for the supported operations. They are divided into the four groups data, multimedia, disc images and utilities.

• Data provides you with the means to burn files to disc, create a boot disc, or use the span disc functionality to burn data across multiple discs. The latter is handy if the size of the data exceeds the disc.
• Multimedia supports the burning of audio CDs or mp3 discs, of video DVDs, or BDMV/AVCHD discs.
• The Disc Images group lists options to burn or copy ISO disc images, to create new ISO images, or to make a boot ISO.
• Utilities last but not least contains tools to erase or verify a disc, or to display disc information.

The operations are straightforward but depend on the selection. If you select data disc for instance, a new window is spawned that displays all available options directly in its interface.

BurnAware counts the size of the data that you have added to the disc creation page so that you know exactly how much space you have left for the operation.

The interface looks similar most of the time which is good as it means that you learn where everything is once and can use the majority of tools without having to orientate yourself first.

What's strange though is that the options button leads to different configuration menus based on the selected tool. This means that you will have to open the options at least once for new tools that you open in BurnAware Free to make sure everything is set up correctly.

BurnAware supports a variety of input formats. You can use it to burn ISO, IMG, NRG, DMG  and cue/bin disc images for instance, and mp3, wav, wma, m4a, aac or flac for the burning of audio CDs.

The free version of the application included third-party offers in the installer in the past, but that does not seem to be the case anymore with newer versions. The installer of BurnAware 9 Free did not contain any third-party offers. and that appears to be still the case in the new version. Make sure you pay attention to the installation dialog to make sure nothing gets installed that you don't want on your system.

BurnAware Free vs Premium vs Pro

The burning software is provided in three different editions, a free version, and the two commercial versions premium and pro.

Premium, available for $19.95 is a personal use version that supports all features of the free version and on top of that the following features:

• Direct disc to disc copies, direct CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray copying.
• Extraction of audio from audio CDs to various audio formats.
• Data recovery from discs that are unreadable.

Pro, available for $39.95, can be used in commercial environments. It supports all features of Free and Premium versions, plus the following:

• Burn ISO images to multiple CD, DVD or Blu-Ray drives simultaneously.

BurnAware 9.0

The most important changes of BurnAware 9.0 are the following ones:

• Full support for the M-Disc format.
• Option to change the file system of the disc at any time added.
• DOS boot image included in the main program package.
• Span Disc tool supports all files systems (ISO, UDF, ISO+UDF) now.
• Session import improved in several ways.
• Compatibility with Video DVDs and MP3 Discs improved.

You can check out the program's version history on the official website.

Verdict

BurnAware is a lightweight streamlined burning software for Windows that gets the job done and is simple to use. It does not bombard you with technical terms but makes those available to users who require them.

Best of all, it is light on resources during operations so that your system does not get bogged down when you are burning discs.

Now You: Which burn software are you using?