NTI Dragon Burn - 4.5.0.15

For what I have thought was very good reasons, I have been extremely critical of this product several times over the years. This revision has finally earned a high mark in my opinion. It is stable, and works well from the get go. Finally, it is well worth the money. Buy it.

All the PCs that we lease come with a license for NTI burning software, and we provide it because it's essentially "free" (incorporated into the cost of the machine), and it does things that the rather poor Windows XP burning software doesn't do.

However, it's complicated, difficult to understand, comes with multiple programs that all seem to be burning tools and yet are all different, and regularly doesn't do what you'd expect (eg: try and handle an ISO file).

And yet, this apparently is not unusual for PC burning software. But it should not be allowed to pollute a company's Mac solution. Toast regularly gets criticized, not without valid reason, but it still remains the yardstick for Mac burning apps. It bothers me when an app requires a "launcher" app - this app does, just as NTI's PC software does. And yet, from the screenshots on their site, the actual burning UI(s) is no more advanced or developed than Hernansoft's BurnX Free, which tells me that instead of adding depth to the program, they're adding layers; again, following the PC way of things.

It apparently does support some decent features, such as Blu-Ray writing, and Blu-Ray reading on Tiger, and yet I have to say that the feature list is not all that impressive, as there are other products that do the same thing.

I would have to say, by all means give it a go. But:
a) look out for the "creative" licensing scheme that they use and
b) don't expect too much - this is after all first and foremost a PC software company

20/11/08 7:08:36 AM [0x0-0x12e12e].com.apple.archiveutility[9221] bunzip2: Compressed file ends unexpectedly;
20/11/08 7:08:36 AM [0x0-0x12e12e].com.apple.archiveutility[9221] perhaps it is corrupted? *Possible* reason follows.
20/11/08 7:08:36 AM [0x0-0x12e12e].com.apple.archiveutility[9221] bunzip2: Inappropriate ioctl for device
20/11/08 7:08:36 AM [0x0-0x12e12e].com.apple.archiveutility[9221] Input file = (stdin), output file = (stdout)
20/11/08 7:08:36 AM [0x0-0x12e12e].com.apple.archiveutility[9221] It is possible that the compressed file(s) have become corrupted.
20/11/08 7:08:36 AM [0x0-0x12e12e].com.apple.archiveutility[9221] You can use the -tvv option to test integrity of such files.
20/11/08 7:08:36 AM [0x0-0x12e12e].com.apple.archiveutility[9221] You can use the `bzip2recover' program to attempt to recover
20/11/08 7:08:36 AM [0x0-0x12e12e].com.apple.archiveutility[9221] data from undamaged sections of corrupted files.

NTI has this little trick in their licensing. When you purchase the license, you only have 90 days to download the software. On the 91st day you need to PURCHASE a new license for the same version!! I just talked to the pre-sales person and they confirmed this.

Not sure why they think this software is so valuable, but they make you jump through all sorts of hops to even get a demo, which is crippled. Time to check out other packages from companies that have sane licensing and customer support

The amount of fu@#ing trouble one has to go through just to download a trial version does not make this an enticing piece of software. What are these developers so afraid of?