Today's useful utility is an excellent CD/DVD utility called ImgBurn. As the name implies ImgBurn can burn CDs and DVDs, but it does a very good job of it and it does a lot of other tasks too. I remember a time when Windows did not come with CD burning software and Nero was free. Now it seems all the major programs like Nero and Roxio cost money. Windows does come with built-in CD burning software which works good, but I find it a bit limited. As far as I know, you cannot burn images (ISO files) with it. I'm also not sure if you can burn audio CDs.
ImgBurn is a program I only discovered a few months ago. It's very simple, it lacks all the fancy UI found in Nero and Roxio - but this is a good thing in my opinion. All it does it is write and rip CDs/DVDs. For writing you can either provide an ISO file (which I typically do) or you can select files like any other program. It also rips discs, but I've never used that feature.
While we're talking about disc utilities, I'd also like to mention CDCopy. CDCopy is a program I've used in the past to rip and encode audio CDs to MP3s. Since I haven't used the ripper in ImgBurn I can't say how it compares, but CDCopy does have one feature I really enjoy. It's called "Classical Mode" and when enabled it will rip and encode audio CDs as one continuous audio track. Most programs rip and encode each track separately which is what you want most of the time. But I have a lot of classical and techno CDs which, although they contain multiple tracks, play as one continuous song. So this feature is very useful.
ImgBurn and CDCopy - two great (and free) disc utility programs that are worth looking into.
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