Review by Ed

Back in the early days of CD mastering software, Adaptec Easy CD Creator (now Roxio) was the only real player in town. Then came Nero, which was light, swift, and powerful. For those in the know, Nero was the choice application for CD mastering, and later for DVDs. When I upgraded to Windows 7, I had a few applications that were no longer supported. Nero 6.x and PowerDVD 5.x were two that I missed most. When I saw a tremendous deal for Nero 9 Reloaded (free after rebate), I jumped at the chance to use Nero again. I was excited to see the changes and improvements from 4 major updates (9 and 9 Reloaded are counted as 1 update each). Despite all the negative reviews, I thought surely it couldn’t be that bad. Right?nnPROS:n- Familiar interfacen- Good burning performancen- Many multimedia features & toolsnnCONS:n- Excruciatingly slow installn- Slow startup speeds for every appn- Too many below average appsn- Shameful forced install of Ask.com toolbarn- Updates are not integrated or easyn- Very poor valuen- Many apps outperformed by free or open source appsnnFor the sake of reviewing Nero 9 Reloaded, I chose to install all the applications in the suite. This amounted to 2.98GB of space required. I knew I’d uninstall most of the applications but wanted to be thorough. Nero Burning ROM is 324MB by itself. At the end of my evaluation, I nearly had to uninstall everything.

INSTALLATIONnAt the very beginning, I was asked if I wanted to install the Ask.com toolbar and make it my default search engine. I elected not to install it. After choosing all the applications to install, I was prompted to install the required 3rd party software, which I was ok with, except that it FORCED me to install the Ask.com toolbar! What. The. Heck??? I timed the actual installation time to be about 22 minutes, during which the installation screen displayed ads for Nero’s other applications. If I were staring at the installation screen for 22 minutes, I think I would have found tips on using Nero 9 to be more useful than watching the same 3 or 4 ads cycle over and over again. This was a bad start. After the install completed, I ran the Nero Control Center, which allows you to manage all the apps in the suite including checking for updates. All it does for updates is open your browser to Nero’s web page and you have to see for yourself if the version numbers match or if there is an upgrade available. The version on the disc I bought was 9.4.17 and version 9.4.26 was available so I downloaded it. All 204MB worth. After numerous failed download attempts and even the failure to run once and re-downloading it, I waited an additional 15 minutes for the update to install. The update forced another couple of 3rd party apps to be installed before completing. All told, I spent over an hour getting Nero 9 ready to go.

NERO BURNING ROMnNero Burning ROM was 90% of the reason why I chose to even try Nero 9. Well, aside from being certified for Windows 7, it is essentially the same as Nero 6. Even the GUI is remarkably similar. On the plus side, because I was so familiar with Nero 6, I was able to find everything quickly and get running right away. Unfortunately, the interface was never a highlight of Nero 6 so it retains the unintuitive characteristics.

NERO SHOWTIMEnShowtime is the media player included in the suite and accounted for about 5% of the reason why I wanted to try Nero 9. Since my old PowerDVD didn’t run on Windows 7, I figured Showtime would be a reasonable upgrade from just using Windows Media Player. While it does offer more options and useful tools, I found that the audio was unacceptable. Watching Star Trek (2009) on it was a far more enjoyable experience on WMP than Showtime. The audio was just bland and not very crisp. What is wrong with this thing? I tried messing with the audio configuration but nothing really helped. Bummer.

NERO VISIONnNero Vision allows one to take a video file, from say a Flip camcorder, and burn it to a physical DVD for playback on a standard component DVD player. Other than adding a few fancy 3D menu templates, it is virtually unchanged from Nero 6. This was the last 5% of why I wanted to try Nero 9.

REMAINING APPLICATIONSnThe rest of the suite is sorely below average. I would use Audacity over the audio editing tools included in Nero 9 and Picasa or Paint. NET over the photo tools. I don’t have a TV tuner on my PC so I could not review the Nero Live tuner/DVR application but I’d guess more of the same. The tools like DiscSpeed, DriveSpeed, and InfoTool are ok, but again, you can find free applications that do the same things. I also did not review the RescueAgent and did not install the free backup software, BackitUp & Burn.

SUMMARYnI thought I would end up writing a review proving all the negative reviewers wrong. Instead, I am saddened by the mighty fall from grace that Nero has taken. Nero 9 is the very definition of bloated. Load times and performance on nearly every application in the suite was painfully slow. And the only application really worth having, Burning ROM, has changed very little from FOUR versions ago. Nero sells just the Burning ROM application for Linux at a reasonable cost and wish they would do that also for Windows because the rest of the suite has watered down the value of Nero. Even then, they would have a hard time competing against a very good free Windows application called CDBurnerXP, which I recommend for those who only need something for data & audio burning and ISO capabilities. It takes up less than 11MB of hard disk space and installs in less than 30 seconds. Oh Nero. Your time is up.