CD Recording
WinOnCD, CeQuadrat, & Roxio
After Roxio first bought CeQuadrat, availability of the excellent WinOnCD package was rather limited outside Germany. Roxio seemed keen to kill the product off, but continuous demand for an English language edition has ensured that successive versions have become more readily available to English (mainly UK) markets.
Version 6 DVD edition in English
You can now buy the English edition of WinOnCD 6. This the DVD Edition variant, which as the name suggests supports DVD burners and DVD authoring. There is also a standard edition without the DVD bits, but that's only available in German. However, WinOnCD 5 PE is still available in English, but as there's only £5 difference you may as well go for the DVD support!
The reason for the small price difference seems to be that when WinOnCD 5 was released in English, it was at a hefty premium over the German edition - it was effectively overpriced. However, the £ and € prices of WinOnCD 6 in the two languages are comparable - you don't pay extra for the English version.
The standard (PE) edition of version 6 in German is a lot cheaper - €60 against £55 for version 5 in English. German editions of WinOnCD 5 would install in an English Windows and offer a Windows UI, only the help and manual were in German. I have to say I don't know if this holds true for WinOnCD 6.
Go to www.roxio.de/english/products for more info or to order online.
Upgrades
If you already have a copy of any version of WinOnCD, you can get current versions at an upgrade price, though the discounts are fairly modest (less than they used to be!).
The Wacky User Interface
I've always liked WinOnCD's structure and general layout, as well as its functionality. It is (or was) a good business-like tool where you could get things done quickly and efficiently. But what are Roxio doing with it! Have a look at this screen shot from the Roxio site.
There seems to have been a lot of time and attention spent on giving the whole program a fancy look, for no particular reason. It doesn't make it in any way easier to use, in fact it's much harder because you keep wondering what all the weird gizmos do, as they're unlike anything already familiar in Windows. Would you guess that the orange blob with the flame in it at the bottom right is what you click to actually start burning a CD? Only after you've wasted time moving the mouse all over the screen, or been forced to read the manual in detail first.
Maybe you'll like it, but does it sell more copies for Roxio? I can't see it somehow. It's just a "because we can" piece of work.
Patches and older versions
Various patches have been issued, and are freely downloadable for current and previous versions. There is already a patch for WinOnCD 6!. Patches can be downloaded here. (This is the English-language download page on the Roxio Germany site - to navigate to it, go to www.roxio.de/english, select Support, then select the link to Dowloads on the left.)
WinOnCD 3.8 had three patches issued before being superceded by version 5. The first two service releases (SR1 & SR2) became incorporated into shipped CDs during 2001, so you may have the base version, SR1, or SR2. The CD label says "Service Release 1/2" as appropriate. Help»About gives the version number as 3.80.689 if SR2 is installed.
You can download update patches to take earlier releases to SR2, one updates the base version directly, the other updates SR1. Get the downloads from the same page as described above.
The third patch is only available on the Web site, and is for XP users. Without this, 3.8 on XP will fail to find the CD drives. The patch can be applied over SR2, and makes 3.8 run happily on XP - you don't need to buy version 5 if you don't want!
The patch also makes the CD-ROM emulator (a handy tool) work properly on XP, although the emulated drive rather bizarrely shows up as a DVD drive.
Roxio say they won't officially support XP, and there will be no more patches for 3.8, so if it still doesn't run you may need to upgrade to 5 or 6.
DirectCD with WinOnCD 3.8
A DirectCD update to the latest release is also available for 3.8 users. Some older updates to DirectCD for WinOnCD wouldn't install properly in English, but the current one works fine, so is worth getting. It's also required if you are using Windows XP.
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