DVD Print is a small program for the Windows operating system. It is a portable software program that will ask for a registration code upon start. This can be skipped however and there are no information on the website or in the application about the registration process (and what could happen if the registration is skipped continuously).

CD and DVD covers can be loaded in the application. A built in search can be used to find appropriate covers. The covers are however not downloaded directly in the software as they redirect the user to the website the cover was found on. It is then the user’s task to download the cover and import it into the DVD printing application.

Various cover presets are available ranging from DVD box covers over audio CD front inserts to Playstation 1 double sleeves. There is also the option to create a new preset in case the existing ones are not suitable for the media.

There is also the option to add image effects to the cover which include the creation of a double-feature cover (for two movies on one DVD), music track overlays or flipping and rotating images around. DVD Print is a portable application that can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website.

Some DVD burning software programs come with so called cover designers that can be used to design custom covers for the burned disks. Many users on the other hand prefer the original covers for their backups and this is what Undercover XP is all about

Undercover XP is a cover printing software that can turn images into DVD covers. It is best used with a website offering those covers for download. Some websites that are recommended by the developers of Undercover XP are Free Covers or CD Covers.

The process has been streamlined and involves only a few steps in the best case scenario. You start by downloading a cover from the Internet or by scanning a cover from the original disk. You usually get one image that contains both the front and back or two images depicting the front and back. These images can then be added to Undercover XP and printed from within the program interface.

Undercover XP supports a wide variety of cover formats from various DVD or CD Box cover formats to covers for games for the Playstation 3, Wii or Playstation Portable or high definition covers for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies.

The software will try to automatically detect the format of the loaded image and correct the orientation as well. It will also position the cover correctly in the printable area so that all of the image will be printed on the printer.

A cover image can simply be loaded by clicking on the left or right image placeholders. This opens a browse computer dialog to load an image. It is furthermore possible to change the format in a pulldown menu in case the program got or you have decided to print it in a different format. The image will be automatically adjusted to the new cover format.

Once the image has been adjusted and the right cover format has been selected it can be printed on a connected printer. It is possible to print everything on a single page to save paper.

Undercover XP comes with a cover format editor. The format editor can be used to edit, add or delete cover formats to the software program.

This can be very helpful if you want to print covers that are not in a default format that ship with the software. Everything from position to paper tray sizes, printer media types and paper sources can be defined in the format editor.

Undercover XP ships with 25 different languages. It is compatible not only to Windows XP but also to Windows Vista and Windows 2000.

A full version of Nero Burning Rom is required as well, it does not currently work with OEM versions of Nero and it is doubtful if Nero Micro and Nero Lite are supported but I cannot say that for sure.

The only other requirements are an operating system that is either Windows 2000 or Windows XP, no word on Windows Vista support yet.

This could come in handy for users who need or have a supported autoloader and burn multiple CDs and DVDs on a regular basis.

Update: The product is no longer available on the developer website. When you open it, you receive a 404 error. The product is no where to be found on the site, and it is likely that it has been discontinued. The QQhandy software on the other hand is still available on the site, but without product availability, it is not of use anymore either.

Update 2: DupliQ is again listed on the website, but in another location. The model can be loaded with up to 25 discs, with the autoloader capable of loading and unloading discs automatically.

DupliQ is the smallest portable CD, DVD and Blu-Ray auto-loader, according to the developer. The product weights about 10 pounds. The device retails on the developer website for $645 US Dollars.

The basic form can list up to 16 titles and offers several optional parameters like selecting the paper format, type (papercase or jewel case) and the font from Western, Japanese, Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional. An advanced form is available as well which increases the tracks to 28, provides room for additional text, an address and return address and a graphic from a selection on the site.

Once a paper has been created it needs to be printed and folded to resemble a paper CD case. Folding the CD case is not complicated, take a look at the image below to see how that is done.

The website provides access to a CD search engine which can automatically fill in the artist, album and track information if the CD is a commercial CD. It’s naturally also possible to use it to create a paper case for a movie or other data by leaving some of the fields blank during the setup.

The initial price for the music collection is three million Dollars with no reserve price. That’s a great bargain if you believe the estimates that the music collection is worth more than fifty million Dollars. The auction will run another two days and the buyer will even get $10 back from eBay if he applies, is not that nice..

A website was created to answer frequently asked questions like why it is for sale, what people can expect, what home they would need to store all those records and CDs. It’s interesting that the collection would be shipped world wide, wonder how much one had to pay for the shipping costs alone.

I would be really tempted to buy the collection if I had the money to do so. It would probably take ages but I guess it would be possible to make a huge fortune by selling the records and CDs separately instead.

It sometimes happens that entries are still listed in the menu even though the application the entry links to has been removed from the system. You may also want to fix entries that show up blank, or entries that display a need provider text instead.

The software Clean Handlers can fix those defect or invalid Autoplay handlers. It can scan for and fix invalid entries in the lists, and delete Autoplay handlers that are not needed or valid anymore.

The program can scan for and repair invalid Autoplay handlers automatically. It creates a backup of Registry keys automatically so that it is possible to restore the data if the repair did not work out as intended.

It is alternatively possible to remove entries manually from the Windows Registry. Make sure you backup the Registry before you start making modifications.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ AutoplayHandlers \ Handlers \

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ AutoplayHandlers \ EventHandlers \

I have for example no intention to display images on media with Opera which is why I decided to remove it from the list. Not that I use the Autoplay feature at all. I prefer to be in control and select what I want to do with inserted media.

Update: The program has been last updated in 2004. While not officially supporting Windows 7, it is at least compatible with the operating system. Users can alternatively download Autoplay Repair from Microsoft. The program, while still available at the Microsoft Download Center, is even older as the listed program.

It is not a secret that online sales are on the rise and are highly profitable and that especially the games sector is seeing a huge rise in sales. I unfortunately do not have numbers for the games and movies sector and online music sales but I suspect if you take everything into account it will even out more or less.

The RIAA will surely whine about pirates once again and fail to see the obvious. I can only speak to myself but I did probably buy three or four albums in the last six years. My main reason is that there are not many releases that please my ear. The charts are dominated by one hit wonders and bands that reunite again to make just another album.

I prefer to listen to Internet radio when I work on my computer and would seriously pay a small amount of money for it. I do not purchase music at iTunes or similar stores because I do not like their pricing structure that much. It is to expensive in my opinion.

I prefer to download music from free sites like Jamendo and reward the artists directly. You will be surprised at the quality of some of the releases at Jamendo.

I did buy more DVDs and Games in that time though. I’d say I roughly bought 50 DVDs in the last two years and maybe 30 games. That’s where my money is going theses days and I suspect that many users are doing the same.

Did you buy music the last years ? Can you think of other reasons why the sales did drop that much ?

We want easy access to music. Want to play it at home, in our car, in our mp3 players, Walkmans, Stereo Recorders and everywhere else we like. They want us to pay for every device that we play the music on. You’ve got a car, a mp3 player and a home computer ? Pay three times for the new record of your favorite artist.

This is in my opinion the number one reason why the Music Industry is doing so badly these days. They don’t want to understand what their customers want. They surely know what we want but they stick with their old, oppressive system without taking advantage of the new possibilities.

“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’,” she said.

Lets remember that we are not talking about stealing music, at least not from my point of view. If I purchase something I would like to be free to use it everywhere I want. It simply does not make sense to pay multiple times for a record only to be able to listen to it in all of your places using all your purchased devices.

My prediction is that the Music Industry is going down if they do not change their attitude and business model. And no, this does not mean to increase prices for digital downloads. This means, give us what we want. Make us happy and your business will thrive.

Support Online Radio instead of fighting it. Support independent online services that introduce new concepts instead of ignoring them. Understand that times are changing and that music itself has to compete against several other entertainment sectors such as movies, mobile phones and games.

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Arstechnica

Although it might look like a universal solution to finding a better way to handle digital data, this technology is probably supposed to be only used for permanent archiving of data, not rewriting (I’ve never found a single mention of rewritable discs on Mempile’s homepage) which rather limits it’s practical use. Also, when storing such a vast amount of data on a single medium, you could soon regret it if the disc got scratched or damaged in some other way. However, it’s still a great deal to have a medium with 1 TB capacity, even if not rewritable. Besides, in the future, when the technology develops even more, the capacity of TeraDiscs should eventually reach up to 5 TB.

This invention appears to be a nice breakthrough in 3D data storage technology but I’m still convinced that it’s only a necessary part of transition which I’m waiting for. I mean who wants to use discs that get easily damaged when not handled properly…

In my opinion, datacubes are to replace discs as we know them in the near future for the purpose of storing digital data 3-dimensionally. Does it sound too much like sci-fi ? Just like internet at the beginning of 19th century ?

This is however not the case. All videos will no longer play after the termination of the service which can be used as a major argument against DRM services. Google – wisely – decided to compensate users by refunding each and everyone

The money will be refunded into a Google Checkout account and expires after 60 days. What this means is that the users who bought videos from Google Video have 60 days to purchase items that they probably do not need from merchants who use Google Checkout. Hardly a fair deal for the consumer if you ask me.

The steps that Google is undertaking to close down their Video service is clearly showing why DRM is not consumer friendly. If the company that sold you items with DRM goes broke, out of business or decides to terminate the service you will realize that your purchased items do not play anymore – and yes, this is also the case with Apple and the songs that they sell that contain DRM.

If you are lucky you get a full refund, if not you might get something that looks like a refund but is basically pushing a different service which is in this case Google Checkout. And if you are out of luck you might not get compensated at all. Does not feel nice to pay a lot of money for items only to find out that you can’t play them anymore on your system, doesn’t it ?

No one would purchase an item in real life that could stop working if the company selling you the item got broke or quit producing the item but this is exactly what is happening right now.

Google sold you videos, made a strategic decision to terminate their service and decided to push the Google Checkout service by tying the refunds to it.

I think it is helpful that consumers now see and hopefully realize that drm media purchased from “big” companies are not guaranteed to work a lifetime which should hopefully push the masses away from DRM.

If a byte is unreadable it skips only that byte by default and tries the next one. This can be very helpful if you want to copy data from scratched or partially unreadable CDs or DVDs, partially unreadable hard drives or other media like zip drives as well. It is possible to change the number of bytes that get skipped during the process. The author recommends that 1 byte is skipped but it is possible to adjust that value to 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000 and one million.

You loose of course more data if you set that value to a higher figure. Using Copy Cat can’t be easier. Just select a source file from your hard drive, CD, DVD or removable storage and select a destination directory. Adjust the number of bytes that get skipped if you like and click on copy.

Copy Cat then tried to read the file byte by byte and copy it to your destination. This method has no guarantee of making all unreadable files work again. I think it should have nice results with text documents and problems with archives. I had no unreadable files of both kinds and could not test my theory. I still think it is more likely that you get CRC errors with the archives if bytes have been skipped during the copy.

One way to check the backups for media integrity is to use a freeware called media checker. Media checker works with all media on devices that are currently connected to the computer it is running. It can scan folders or complete drives and really supports everything that you want to check for media integrity.

I contacted the author of Media Checker because it was not clear to me how media checker performed the check and decided whether a file was corrupted or not. The author answered me this way: “Media Checker considers the data to be safe when all the files in all subfolders of a selected media or folder can be read without any error from the beginning to the end. The program list all the files and attempt to read all of them byte by byte until the end.”

A way of using media checker would be to test the backups from time to time and react immediately when one check fails. This works best if you have two or even more backups of the same data of course.

Undercover XP is such a freeware that makes it very easy to create covers in the correct size for many different types of media. This includes covers for CDs and DVDs, DVD boxes, inlays, Playstation backs and Digital Pictures.

Just add a image in formats such as jpg, bmp, gif or png to Undercover XP and the tool will automatically resize the image to the right format for the selected media.

Undercover XP comes equipped with a format editor that makes it easy to add new formats for media that you own. Just add a new format with the exact sized that you want it to be.

The best feature of Harddisk Ogg is that it sits in the tray once configured and you can start the recording with a single mouse click and end it with another one. The quality of the recorded audio can be configured in detail including bitrate, mono or stereo recording and encoding quality.

Harddisk Ogg offers several normalization modes that amplify the input signal to a constant volume. You need to download and move the lame encoder into the folder of Harddisk Ogg to be able to record mp3 files directly.

I would like to explain why a tool like Harddisk Ogg might be useful now or in the near future. Several countries have already laws in place that make it illegal to copy music from Cd’s if the CD is copy protected. They still allow however to record the songs using audio devices and compare this to the recording of radio with audio tapes.

This is also great if you want to rip audio from music videos that you found on the internet or from youtube videos.

So, the RIAA decided to sue Allofmp3 for the enormous sum of 1.65 trillion dollars. Yes that is right guys, it is not million, nor billion – it is trillion. How did they come up with this amount of money ? They took a look at the sales of allofmp3 and came up with the figure of 11 million mp3 sales in about 6 months. They then decided to multiply this number by 150000 (which is the maximum amount chargeable by law) and came up with the number.

Will the RIAA finally be able to knockout the underdog ? Even if the RIAA wins this case it won’t have an effect on the Russian mp3 site because it would only affect them if they would run their business from the United States. As long as they don’t come stateside they are probably on the safe side.
I personally think that is is ridiculous to demand $150000 for every single song that has been downloaded from the allofmp3 website. The proportions get way out of line here.

All the software products are either open source or freeware which have been added with permission of the author of the product. You might know most of the products already but it is still worth checking out for the occasional program that one does not know. Take a look at the list of software that has been included so far. Each contains a link to the developers homepage which is an alternative method to download them.

It is kinda strange that some games have made it into the final distribution, not sure about the motivation to add them to the package. It is nevertheless a great compilation, I found some tools that I have not heard about (yet) and which I will review once I find the time to do so.

The firmware of your burner has information on various manufacturers and their products including the maximum speed of the media. If a CD or DVD is used and no information can be found the burner will not use the maximum speed but a slower speed and increase that over time – this means of course that the process takes longer even though the burner and the blank disc are capable of faster speeds.

Fixing this is probably easy. The first step would be to make sure that your burner has the latest firmware installed; The firmware page collects and tracks firmwares of various burners, check them out. Make sure you read the instructions on that page before you proceed, your burner could stop working if the upgrade fails.

You should check the website of the manufacturer of the burner for firmware upgrades as well, it is always better to use the offical source if available.

If you can’t find an upgrade for your burner or the upgrade did not help in your special case you can do the following to speed up the process:

• Make sure that your burner is connected correctly to your system, if it is possible make him secondary master.
• Check the current transfer mode (DMA) of the burner. (Hardware Manager)

You can also check blank DVDs and CDs and find out which are best suited for your burner and purchase them from then on. DVD Identifier checks DVD and displays information about the manufacturer of the blank discs, nero cd speed does the same for CDs.

Once you know the manufacturer of the media and checked that you can burn with max speed you start buying only media from that manufacturer from then on. Please note that the name of the company on the blank media not necesarily reflects the real manufacturer.

Music Retailers argue against the music industry which defends using copyrighted cds by claiming its to prevent the unauthorized duplication of their cds. They take the side of the customers seeing that customers get frustrated by copy protected cds and tend to buy less. Tim Baker of Sunrise Records, a large retailer in southern Ontario puts it this way : “This is just another really, really ridiculous way of telling our customers, We don’t want your business”.

I personally think its good for the customers if music retailers are finally speaking out against this and show the music industry that not only the customers but also the retailers don´t like this practice. Retailers of course have different reasons for this but it nevertheless is a valuable addition to the customers position. Its rather strange that the music industry on the one hand cries about reduced cd sales but on the other hand introduce more and more protection mechanisms that do nothing to stop people from copying their cds but stop the customers from buying them. This is ridiculous.

A lot of my friends stopped buying cds that have a copy protection sign on the case. I think many people don´t care about copy protection until they find out that they can´t copy a song from the cd to their newly bought MP3 player.

Nevertheless its good news that retailers are siding on this topic with their customers.

This procedure is really helpful if you are using cd or dvd media often but are to lazy to get them and put them into your drives. You create a image of it and place it on your hard disk. When you need to access data from the cd or dvd you don´t need to go and get it, its already setup.
Daemon tools itself is not creating images, you need additional software like Nero for this.

The servers are really loaded at the moment, could be that you will have to wait until your download starts.

DAEMON Tools – Original Discs to Virtual Discs

DAEMON Tools is freeware that allows you to backup physical discs to a virtual format on your PC. There is a paid version that extends this capability, but with the basic version (DAEMON Tools Lite) you can emulate up to 4 CD/DVD virtual drives on your PC. This tool is useful have if you are interested in creating ISO and MDS images from original discs.

The virtual drives created with this software contain all of the data from the original source. These will appear on you operating system as though they were real. The point of virtualization is to take real data and utilize disc images to create drives that are “virtual” but they work like the real thing. This is practical for using virtual machines and the same methods can be used to convert discs of hard data into usable virtual data.

You start by selecting a virtual drive and then use any disc image that you wish to mount. DAEMON Tools will create the mounted disc image in My Computer and you can start working from there. You will quickly notice that the virtual disc works just like the original. Now you can start considering the possibilities. If you have experience with virtualization, this is an exciting piece of software for you to try. Once you see what it can do, it is likely that you will want the Pro version so that you can take the capabilities even further and integrate disc images for operating systems into viable virtual machines. You know what to do, if that is the case.

You can take CDs, DVDs and even HDs or Blu-Ray from solid discs and make them virtual, while also having the ability to us ISO images that you have created at earlier times. All of this fits into the Daemon Tools kit. You simply use this software to create .iso and .mds images from solid media. Formats that are supported include .b5t, .b62, .bwt, .ccd, .cdi, .cue, .nrg, .pdi and .isz.

The GUI can guide you through all of this “mess” and allow you to create easily accessed virtual drives. If, however, you want to use a command line, there is an excellent command line interface that can give you more control. For advanced users, this is like being a kid in a candy store, except you are a techno-kid dealing with file formats.

Can these virtual drives be converted to your own disc media? Yes, they can. That takes a little more tweaking and you need to remember that copying certain hard disc data and disc media does have legal implications. It is best to keep this as a way to organize disc data into virtual formats for ready access, strictly for personal use. For advanced users, there is much that can be done with this software. You can automate from the command line interface and perform basic actions from the DAEMON Tools gadget on the Windows Desktop, but where you take it from there is up to you.