These days, if you have not yet used your PC to burn a CD, then you probably will soon. CDs are, bar none, the most convenient way to make backups, distribute data, etc. (at least with today’s technology). Besides a CD recorder drive, you’ll also need a program to operate your CD burner. There are many of them out there, some better than others. Stomp, Inc. has created their own program for this purpose – Click N’ Burn Pro. I had an opportunity to review version 2.0 of this software, and while I’m partial to Nero (from Ahead Software), Click N’ Burn seems to be on par. It is easy to use and designed such that it offers the flexibility and features for an advanced user and the simplicity needed for a newbie.

Burning with Pure Wizardry

Installation of the software is painless, and you have the option to install some of Stomp’s other software directly off the CD. Once you crank it up, you may find that you’ll need to download the latest patches from Stomp’s website. I use a TDK 24/10/40B and the software did not even recognize the drive after the new install. After a patch, though, everything was fine.

Upon starting up the program, you will see that it runs in two “modes”, if you will. By default, it begins in the “Starter” interface. This is the mode which is easiest to use and obviously designed for newbies to the world of CD burning. Here you have large interface buttons for Disc-to-Disc Copy, Audio Disc, Data Disc and “DJ Burn”. DJ Burn is Click N’ Burns (CNB) way of allowing you to record audio CDs directly from WAV files, MP3′s or even Live Audio from your PC’s microphone. It also allows you to create audio CDs over the span of several recording sessions, so you can add songs to the CD later. I was unable to test the Live Audio recording feature, unfortunately. It gave me a “PX Engine Error – 20″ error – whatever that means (more on these messages in a bit). The starter interface is nice and I think new users will find it easy to use.

If you would like to use the program in its “Full Application” mode, then you just click on the button from the starter interface. You can also set the program in preferences to start automatically in this full mode. This full mode has a pretty standard interface, with the menu at the top, a left frame which contains a listing of CD drives on your PC, and the large main frame which contains your work area. The top menu includes icons for going into each of the burning modes I discussed before, although the DJ Burn option does not seem to included with the Full mode. I saw all the audio recording options, but I could not find the option for recording live audio. In the menu, you can also save your compilations, open/close the CD tray and a variety of other standard options.

Burning CDs in either interface is fairly straight-forward. Once you have chosen the type of recording you will be doing, you have access to the file system to go choose the files or folders you wish to burn, where they be audio files or data files, or files of a video format. In the advanced interface, you have more options to choose for your recording, including things to the depth of recording mode, file system type, etc. Once you have compiled the CD as you want it, you can choose whether to just burn the CD, do a test burn, or both. Once this is selected, press the burn button and watch it go. Burning audio CDs is pretty easy with the software, allowing full control over the track names, authors, song titles and many other options. It was also quite nice to be able to record music CDs directly from an MP3 file and be able to play the CD in any standard CD player. My only real complaint on all of this is that I could only select one file or folder to add to the CD at a time. In order to multi-select several files or folders and drag them all into the burning interface, I had to use an external application such as Windows Explorer. More flexibility is needed here.

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