reviewsTESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED
94 MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2005
D
on’t let the “bloatware” boogeyman
scare you away. Even though the
Nero 7 Ultra Edition suite now comes
with no fewer than 18 applications, you’ll
never even see the ones you don’t want or
need. But adventurous types will discover
that Nero 7 has reinvented itself as a suite
that’s as useful for enjoying your media as it
is for committing it to disc.
At the fore of this new angle is Nero
Home, a sleek media-center interface
with large, comfy icons that are as easy
to see and control from the couch (via a
third-party remote control) as they are to
access on your PC. Launching Nero Home
automatically fires up Nero Scout, which
indexes the media files on all of your drives,
or just the drives and folders you specify
(in case you want to exclude video of a
personal nature). Nero Home also includes
integrated TV time-shifting that trots you
gracefully through the setup process. You
can then search through your media files
and your TV recordings from the Nero
Home screen, and even create playlists
without losing your proximity to the potato
chips. Nero Scout also shows up in My
Computer, giving you a directory-like alter-
native structure to access your media.
It’s a testament to the maturity of
Nero’s core CD- and DVD-burning appli-
cation that little has changed—or needed
to—other than a nominally cleaner and
more configurable interface. With so many
applications in the suite, however, Nero
SmartStart earns its keep as a task-basedusher that sends you where you want to
go, to do what you want to do, whether
it’s compressing an (unencrypted) double-
layer DVD to fit on a single-layer disc,
editing WAV files with Nero Wave Editor 3,
or importing photographs from an SD card
using Nero Photosnap.
Other applications, however, got the
extra lovin’ they needed to be useful as
stand-alone utilities. Nero BackItUp, for
example, is now capable of performing
scheduled backups to an FTP address, and
the new “Shadow Copy” feature can save
stumblebums from disaster by making back-
up copies at intervals throughout the day, so
that a carelessly deleted file can be retrieved
from a stored copy.
Another component that got a huge
upgrade is audio recording, with Nero WAV
Editor 3 supporting tracks with up to 7.1
channels and automatic track splitting (so
your vinyl rip will automatically be importedas individual tracks based on the silence
between songs). For heaven’s sake, you
even get Nero SoundBox, a clever and intu-
itive sonic playground that includes a drum
machine and sequencer to create your own
“beats,” which could bag you a DJ gig in
Miami a few months down the road. Or
more likely not.
Naturally, we can come up with a couple
complaints. We would have liked the media
player Nero ShowTime 2 to support external
subtitles in the SUB or SRT formats, and
though we’re well aware of the capabilities
of the homegrown Nero Digital MPEG-4
codec, we’d have preferred to see Nero
support encoding to other MPEG-4 formats,
such as Divx, in addition to Nero Digital.
This is an application suite polished so
brightly you can see your reflection in it, and
history tells us that Nero 7 Ultimate Edition
is a whopping value. Two years elapsed
between versions 5 and 6, and another two
years between 6 and 7, during which time
registered users were entitled to download
updates and even whole applications added
to the suite at no additional charge. We’ll go
beyond endorsing Nero 7—we’ll ask, can
you afford not to have it?
—LOGAN DECKERNero 7 Ultra Edition
You’ll fiddle while Nero burns!
Nero Home, the “10-foot” interface included with Nero 7, is easily navigable even if
you’re tucked in bed with a compatible remote.Nero 7 didn’t mess with the simple, classic interface we’ve been happy with for years. $00, http://www.NERo.comNERO 7 ULTRA EDITIONDISC DRIVES
Nero 7 makes 18 applica-
tions as easy to use and
enjoy as a single one.
BEEHIVES
No external subtitle support
in Nero ShowTime 2; no
support for Divx.9
MA XIMUMP
CKICKASS