While the use of CD and DVD for storing your data has become a little bit outdated for the everyday PC user, it is always not entirely disadvantageous to have a DVD writer drive. We can get these optical disc burner drives easily from Amazon or a local computer shop. For the desktop computers internal CD/DVD/BD drives are available. For the laptop computers, the external portable USB based DVD/Blu-ray Drives are easily available.
If you have any kind of optical drive attached to your Windows PC, then you might benefit from a free software called StarBurn. It is a portable application for Windows that allows all kinds of tasks related to optical disc drives. It supports all the different types of discs – CD, DVD or Blu-ray discs.
When we launch StarBurn, it shows a window that has shortcuts to all the different functions or tools that it offers. These functions include :
- Burn Data: Using this tool we can burn any kind of data files to a blank disc.
- Burn Image: This tool helps us burn a disc image such as ISO file to a blank disc.
- Build Image: Using this we can create a disc image using files on our PC. It can be made bootable too.
- Grab Image: This helps creating a disc image (ISO) from an existing CD/DVD or Blu-ray disc.
- Burn Audio: We can use this tool for burning audio tracks over to a blank CD.
- Grab Audio: Using this tool, we can extract the audio tracks from an audio CD.
- Convert Audio: We can convert audio file formats from one to another using this tool.
- Fast Erase: It quickly erases the contents of a RW disc by erasing the file table.
- Full Erase: This is used to fully erase an RW disc by neutralizing the whole surface.
- Burn VCD/SVCD/DVD: These tools are useful for creating movie discs.
For using any of these features, a wizard like interface is utilized. We are taken from one step to another and we have to make some selections. Before you know, it starts to burn the files to a blank disc.
These standard functions for burning CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs are available in the portable version. In the non-portable free version of StarBurn, it also installs a virtual DVD drive on Windows. We can mount disc images (ISO) on this virtual DVD drive.
You can download Starburn from https://www.starburnsoftware.com/.