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Good morning readers!

Burning CDs/DVDs in the 21st century has become not only big business, but it's also put what was once only the domain of paid professionals into the hands of the layman.

These days, just about anyone who is prepared to read help files, is able to choose and use the plethora of CD/DVD burning programs on the internet to achieve their desired outcome.

Today, we're going to examine Romeo Burner 2.0 which is created by the same people who put out the excellent program Sticky Password, which I've also reviewed here.

Developer: Romeo Development Group

Supported Languages: English (support planned for other languages in the future.)

System Requirements: Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista.

Additional Requirements: None.

Tested on: Windows XP Pro.

The people at Romeo, tell us that their latest release of the product, is terrific for "recording, ripping, mastering and editing of CD, DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs." That's a whole lot of functionality for the home user.

While I could work it out, less experienced people might have been confused by the first option given to us during installation of the program. I've included a screen shot here, but basically it says: "Allow to use Romeo for users without administrative rights."

The person who wrote the dialog is assuming that the person installing the software is the administrator of the machine where it's being installed, which makes one wonder if the software can even be installed by a non-administrative person.

With children in the house that think they can already do everything on the computer ;) I installed it strictly with administrative rights, meaning that no-one else in the house is able to burn CDs with this software. I found this to be a very nice (protective,) feature of the software.

GUI (Graphical user interface:)

I was completely thrown when I looked for a GUI and didn't find one! The installation places an icon on your desk, called Romeo Projects. Clicking on this, launches what looks like a normal folder, but with the Romeo logo in the bottom right corner.

The folder contains two links; one called New Project and the other one called Disc Images. (Note to developer: 'Disc' should be 'Disk' for American release.)

New Project:

To begin, the user clicks on New Project, which brings up the dialog to the right. You're asked for a both a project name and a project type. You can choose from three types: Data; Audio and CD Extra Project, which apparently is Romeo's way of identifying CDs that contain both audio and data.

I was surprised that there wasn't an option for creating video projects, given that this is DVD burning software! Data projects also have two types: Link to Files and Direct Files Copy. The dialog says that, if you choose Link to Files; all files adding to the project, will be linked to the source files and if you choose Direct files copy, all files added to the project will be copied to the project.

However, it's not clear why you'd choose one over the other, though I'm guessing the link option would save space on your hard drive.

Because I chose Link to Files when I set up the first project, I noticed that the Romeo Folder now had three icons, the last representing the new project I'd created.

Disc Images:

This was the second icon already in the Romeo folder after installation. Clicking on this, revealed another icon, called; New Group. I had no idea what this actually meant.

When I clicked on it I got another dialog, which asks for a Group Name and has a checkbox labeled; Open group after creation.

But there's no explanation for what a 'group' is, or why I'd create a new one. Not seeing any kind of help available, I checked back to the installation folder where a help file was stored.

It would have been nice if you could access the help file immediately from the folder, so I created a short cut for the help file and tried to place it in the Romeo folder with the other two icons. For some reason it just refused to let me do this, which annoyed me to no end.

Groups are a way of collectively storing certain projects; so you can have a group for disk images and another for something else - it's all up to you. (See first image in review.)

When you create a new project, you see an almost normal Explorer window which has a couple of new icons on the toolbar: Burn and Additional actions. The latter is a drop down box that gives you the choice to: Erase disc; Copy disc; Burn video disc; Burn disc image; Grab Audio disc; Grab disc image; and Create disc image. The same options are there for Audio and Data projects.

The burn button, brings up the appropriate dialog for Audio or Data CDs. The dialogs have all the options I ever use. Data CDs & DVDs can be made bootable. There's even a ruler bar at the top that tells you how much data your project has in it.

With no disk in my burner, the ruler topped out at 702Mb (which should be MB or MiB...Mb is Mega-bits, which is incorrect.)

When I inserted a DVD, the ruler changed to top out at 4.38Gb [sic.] For Audio CDs, most of the options I would normally use are available; however, there were a couple functions missing:

There's no setting to control the gap between tracks on the CD and there's no way to write in Disc at Once mode. There is a dropdown box for Write mode, but it only contains one option; Track at Once. It's not even worth being a drop down box.

The most noticeable item missing that appears in other similar software burn dialogs, is the ability to write a disk image to my hard drive. The Create Disc Image option partially fulfills this role, however there doesn't appear to be any way to create an image of an audio disk.

Also, it doesn't seem that you can choose between multi-session and non-multi-session disks when creating an image. You can, however, create a bootable disk image. All in all, it would have been better had Romeo followed the convention of other disk burner software and just provided a way to select a virtual CD/DVD burner as the output device and dispensed with the Create disc image tool altogether.

Options:

Erase disc contains the options you'd expect. Unfortunately, I don't have any erasable disks, so I couldn't test it.

Copy disc does about what you'd expect. Again, it would be nice to be able to use this to copy to a disk image, but Romeo does do the same thing with the Grab disc image option.

Burn disc image lets you copy a disk image from your hard drive to a physical CD or DVD. Three formats are supported: ISO, NRG (Nero's proprietary format) and MDS (Alcohol's proprietary format.) Surprisingly, the widely supported BIN/CUE format is not supported by Romeo.

Grab audio disc is a CD ripper. You can rip CDs to MP3 (with the LAME encoder) or to WMA. You can also rip the uncompressed audio to WAV files. When MP3 or WMA are chosen, you can select the bitrate, but there's no option to select a variable bitrate. There's also no indication of whether ripping to WMA will add Microsoft's DRM (Digital Rights Management,) to your ripped files or not.

As mentioned above, the Grab disc image option lets you copy a CD or DVD to an image file. This option supports ISO and MDS formats. These are fairly adequate.

As I said earlier, the Create disc image option lets you write your CD or DVD project to a disk image. But this is only for data disks. There's no support for creating images from audio projects.

Burn video disc lets you create a video CD or DVD. Video CD (VCD), Super Video CD (SVCD), and Digital Video Disk (DVD) formats are supported. Unfortunately, this feature is very sparse. There's no way to create menus or chapters or any of the features one normally finds on video disks. You can simply copy some video to a disk.

Help File:

I found the help file for Romeo Burner to be excellent. It contained many screen shots, with explanations that would teach the novice how to use the software easily.

My only negative comment is that the grammar really needs reworking and that it lacks a bookmarking feature found in most other help files. If I think I'm going to forget something, this is a feature that I use all the time in other help files.

Features:

All the "Additional Actions" are available as individual programs in the Romeo Start Menu folder. So you can simply navigate to the Romeo folder in your Program Files and see them all listed there. This is a nice feature;

The integration into the Windows context menu is always appreciated by users;

Built-in media player for preview audio;

Built-in MP3 Tag editor;

CDDB support;

Able to use Romeo Burner via command line. I've found that many tech., types prefer to work this way - frankly I was happy to leave a DOS interface behind, when Windows came out with the first version of their OS. ;)

Negatives:

Help file should be immediately available from the Romeo folder where you're working;

No ability to choose between a multi-session and non-multi-session disk when creating an image;

While 'disc' is the correct spelling in Europe and Australia, it is not here in the United States. (Americans have bastardized the English language anyway! ;) All instances of this needs to be changed to 'disk.'

Software should be able to include the BIN/CUE format when burning a disk image;

Software should include support for creating images from audio projects;

Software should include the ability to add menus and chapters when burning video disks.

Serious Errors:

When I tried to burn some video to a disk, I got an incomprehensible error, with no indication of how to correct it:

'Error :: StarBurn_DVDVideo_Create() failed, exception 5, status 2, text "CStarBurn_ScsiTransportSPTI::ExecuteCDB(): Command failed'.

My husband who has been a professional software developer for the past 25 years or more, looked on and said, "No end user should ever see an error like that.The error dialog helpfully offered to send the error to Romeo for me. However when I clicked that button, I got another error dialog:

Unable to send e-mail to: support@romeoburner.com. Reason: Invalid pointer operation.

Apparently their Send Error function is not fully debugged as yet.

When I tried to burn an audio CD on a non-blank CD-R, Romeo did offer to erase the disk for me. But when I accepted the offer, I got yet another incomprehensible error:

ERROR :: StarBurn_CdvdBurnerGrabber_Blank() failed, exception 8, status 31, text "CStarBurn_ScsiTransportSPTI::ExecuteCDB(): Command failed"'

Points:

Originality: 6/10
Functionality: 7/10
Intuitiveness: 6/10

Price: USD$19.99 (one license.)

When Romeo Burner has all its problems fixed, the price will be worthy of the softwares functionality.

Summary:

As a very simple data and audio CD burner, Romeo is adequate. There are lots of other more fully featured programs out there, but Romeo has a nice clean (when no errors are present) user interface.

The error handling needs a lot of work. Users should never see the kinds of error messages I quoted above. Those messages are useful to the developer to see what went wrong, but that's all.

I couldn't get the Video CD/DVD burner working at all. Even if I had, unfortunately it's just barely adequate, though perhaps good enough for a beginner who just wants to put some video on a DVD.

The lack of ability to create menus and chapters is, perhaps, ok for beginners, but even beginners will soon want to step up to something better.

Recommendation:

While there are still some teething problems with Romeo Burner 2.0, I do have hope that it will improve with future releases. This was a commissioned review, and the person I spoke with knows that I don't pull any punches with my testing and subsequent reviews of software.

This shows me that the people at Romeo Burner Development Group are serious about it's current abilities, what the software lacks and how it can be improved.

At the moment, I'm unable to recommend Romeo Burner to you, but I do suggest that you keep an eye on their web site for the next version, which I'm sure will address all the issues mentioned here.

I'd also like to thank Aleksandr at Romeo Development Group for commissioning this review.

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Enjoy the rest of your day!
~ Swan