BHA B’s Recorder GOLD8 Basic Review

Audio And Video Creation:

The next tests we will perform are on the Audio and Video elements of the program. The Audio test will be the creation of a CD. The Video test will be the creation of both a Video CD and DVD.

Audio

The next test we will go through is the one for Audio creation.

A 78 minute 53 seconds compilation was chosen for this test, which was put together from a number of different songs.

Once the wizard is running, it’s a simple matter of dragging and dropping or selecting the music files required. Once the files have been selected, they can be reordered in any way you wish.

The recorder chosen was the NEC ND-3500AG

Since this was an audio CD the burn speed chosen was 16X.

The burn completed in 4 minutes 51 seconds.

The media was Verbatim 52X DataLifePlus

After the burn completed, the disc was played back using rimFOLIO, GOLDS playback software included in the package, this was launched from TaskGate.

The disc played flawlessly from start to finish. Below is a screenshot of the rimFOLIO application in use.

Video DVD

The next test we will go through is the one for Video DVD creation.

I thought I would kill two birds with one stone with this test. B’s GOLD8 BASIC doesn’t support the authoring or creation of DVD Video discs, although this is available as an add-on pack.

On B’s recorder, the wizard was ignored and two folders were created called AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS in the compilations route directory. These are the two basic folders needed to create a DVD Video disc.

The pre-authored files were then dragged into the appropriate VIDEO_TS folder and the project burned to the BenQ drive.

A YUDENT0002 was selected as the media, as this burns at 16X on this drive and the recording was started. 6 minutes 4 seconds later the project was completed with a DVD Video compliant disc that played on the PC and my set top DVD player.

Although the BenQ drive is not officially supported with this program, the drive had no problem burning and completing the task.

Video CD

The next test we will go through is the one for Video CD creation.

A 515 Megabyte MPG-1 video file was chosen for this test.

The burn drive for this task was once again the BenQ DW1620A. This drive is not officially supported in GOLD, so the only burn speed available was maximum. This is one area with unsupported drives that could cause a problem, as I wouldn’t normally burn a VCD above 8X.

The burn completed in 2 minutes 33 seconds. The resulting disc played back in my PC using Windows Media Player 10 and my set top DVD player without problems.

Now lets take alook at the “On-The-Fly” CD/ DVD Copying.