SilentNight Microburner 6 Review

For most people, burning CDs and DVDs is not something to do every day, and I can't say I burn optical discs more often than changing my socks, but it's always wise to use the best tools for your tasks, even if you leave them untouched for weeks or even months.

Now, that Nero reached version 8 and, to be honest, I didn't like what I have seen and heard about it so far, looking for a light weight, easy to use and reliable burning software should get a higher priority in your daily schedule than before, but since you're here, let me show you what I found today...

Setup

SilentNight Microburner is the name of the program I have here, and its last version is 6.0.22, released on the 12th of March. This software is priced at 29$, but a free demo version with various limitations and nags is also available, and that's exactly what I got here.











The setup package is very small, for a CD/DVD burning software suite like this one here, with less than 2MB in size. Once you have downloaded the file, the rest of it is very easy, without any special things to do, as you can see above - just another Windows software installation!

Interface

While I find Microburner's interface to suffer from various consistency problems, I love it. There are three skins available at this time, and I hope to see more added in the future. From the "launch center" that you can see in the screenshot to the left, you can choose the task you want to run or fire up the File Splitter/Joiner, the only tool available in the menu with the same name. Getting back to the consistency problems, I have to tell you that each tool seems to have its own layout - some have big windows, some are small, and I don't appreciate this, but you shouldn't have big problems because of that, anyway.

Features

Now...each time you choose a task in the launch center, an evaluation nag screen appears, and you have to wait for 5 seconds before being allowed to press the Continue button.

I was happy to see that the Audio CD/DVD burner has a player built in, but I also got a cold shower when I noticed that losless files can't be added to my audio CD compilation (I tried with APE and FLAC files, so I guess other formats, less popular, are not supported either).

Using the data and audio burners is very easy, and the settings of this pgoram are excellent. If you don't know what a certain option is for, you can simply right click it to get all the information you need about it.

The Backup tool is a very good addition to this suite, but it can only save data to CD/DVD and tape drives. I am not looking as far as FTP servers, but at least the chance to save backup ISO images would be nice.

At last, you get a cover designer that allows you to load image files from your hard drive or from a scanner and, of course, turn them into covers for your discs. An impressive amount of file formats are supported for opening and saving by the cover designer, yet a message in the status bar says "This part of SilenNight Microburner is under Construction!". Well, I hope they'll get it all done until next version...

The Good

SilentNight Microburner looks good, is easy to use and comes with a lot of features for its price.

The Bad

I can't help to notice that the interface has some problems, and while I was using it, the program even crashed on me once! Fortunately, I wasn't burning any disc at that time... The lack of Blu-Ray support is also a serious drawback.

Conclusion

I hope I didn't judge SilentNight Microburner too rough, because I usually have Nero in mind when I review data burning software. Since Nero is priced around 80$, and this one here is almost 3 times cheaper, all I can say is that, while it can't compete with Nero and other similar suites, SilentNight Microburner 6 remains a very good choice for its price!

Developer: SilentNight Multimedia Tools
Price: 29$
Trial Link: Download