BurnAware
Lightweight program that enables you to create audio, video and data discs, generate images for later use, copy DVDs, CDs or Blu-rays and erase disc contents.
Features
- Lightweight
- Create bootable CD
- CD Burner
- DVD Burner
- Disc Burner
- Audio Conversion
BurnAware News & Activities
Recent News
Recent activities
- kayi_giome liked BurnAware
- Danilo_Venom updated BurnAware
POX added BurnAware as alternative to WinDiskWriter- julialjonesjones liked BurnAware
BurnAware information
What is BurnAware?
Choosing a CD/DVD burning software is not quite an easy job anymore because there are quite a lot of dedicated tools out there. Leaving the big names in the business and their complex suites aside, among the smaller yet popular apps you can find BurnAware Free.
Clear-cut GUI You are required to go through a relatively quick setup process, yet you should be aware of the fact that it comes packed with some third-party products. However, choosing the custom installation can help you get rid of these with just a click of the button.
You come to meet a pretty clean interface which encompasses, in the main screen, all the features you can take advantage of. Clicking on one is going to bring up a new windows, with a typical design for this type of program.
Create video, audio and data discs First of all, it is important to keep in mind that this application enables you to create discs with any kind of file type you can think of, while you can also use any kind of disc you can think of with it.
As a result, generating data, MP3 or video discs is a piece of cake, as well as creating audio CDs. The latter supports formats such as AAC, M4A, MP3, OGG, WAV, and WMA.
Create images, back up information and verify the integrity of a disc Creating bootable discs is also possible, as well as making ISO images from local files using an ISO 9660, UDF or Bridge file system, and burning DMG, IMG, NRG, BIN, CUE, ISO file extensions to a CD, DVD or BD.
Backup utilities are present, in the sense that you can copy the contents of a disc to an ISO or BIN file. Last but not least, you can bring up information pertaining to the inserted CD, DVD or Blu-ray (e.g. type, status, used and free space, number of sessions etc.), verify it for errors, erase or format rewritable discs.
Performance and conclusion CPU and memory usage varies, depending on the process under way, yet you should know it mostly sticks to the lower values. All tasks are completed in a pretty fair amount of time, without popping up errors or hanging, and the interface is accessible to all user categories.
As a conclusion, BurnAware remains a top pick when it comes to burning solutions. The very strong feature pack coupled with a great ease of use can definitely make this utility a good choice for all users.
Said about BurnAware as an alternative
Much better: it can do everything nero does and it's FREE
Comments and Reviews
This is a great program. It has nothing less compared to other DVD softwares and It has all the functionalities you will need to create, burn and modify ISOs, Blu-rays DVDs, CDs.|
These are the features that are inaccessible in the free version: Disk spanning, Disk copying, Extracting Files from ISOs ( This can be done easily with 7zip), Extracting Audio tracks from Audio CDs, Recovering Data from corrupted Disks.
I've been using it for a while and I'm pretty satisfied.
I decided to start backing up some files that are particularly valuable to me on M-Discs, which are supposed to be very resilient and long-living. Having all of my data only stored on magnetic storage (SSDs, hard disks, USB drives, SD cards…) increasingly felt like a cluster risk, so I wanted to make some optical backups again.
The issue: what software to burn the files with? Optical drives have gone out of style, and you can easily tell just by browsing disc burning software on AlternativeTo: about 80% of them have seemingly been discontinued. Many would probably still work fine, but I feel more comfortable using a tool which is still maintained, even though M-Disc burning is not supposed to work any differently than burning regular Blu-ray discs.
BurnAware is still regularly updated and has a free version available, so that's what I tried first. And I'm pretty happy with it!
Be careful when installing: there are some bundle offers it tries to convince you to install along with it. They are easily disabled, and I checked with Total Uninstall that it did, in fact, not install anything I didn't want.
The feature set for the free version (free for personal use only) is also perfectly sufficient for disc burning. What you miss compared to the paid edition are additional features such as disc duplication or audio CD ripping. The functionality that's included in the free edition works without further limitations, and without nagging you to upgrade, which I appreciate.
The compilation of files for a disc is simple, but completely sufficient. You get the usual overview of how much space is left on your disc (or how much you're already over capacity), and you can easily edit the compilation through drag & drop. Saving a compilation is also possible. BurnAware also supports all the usual buffer underrun protection, anti-sleep-mode etc. options to reduce the chance of any issues while burning. And so far, it hasn't wasted any of my blank discs yet, which is especially important when burning M-Discs, because they're quite expensive.
I didn't feel the need to try any other tools after BurnAware did the job so well. If it doesn't for you: my next in line to try would have been AnyBurn, which also has quite a feature-rich free version. Apart from these two, the only other, still-maintained tool I found on the quick, was Nero Burning ROM, which might also work fine but doesn't offer a free option.