SRS -

I've gotten Nero bundled with a couple of machines, and it's great for audio files. I don't do a lot of that kind of burns, so I can't say there's a big difference between the two programs for audio. I often still go to Nero for my occasional audio CD.

I had a lot of trouble with Nero on data files though, because when it finds a file/path that's a little out of bounds it doesn't give you a clear indication of which file is the problem.

I got Roxio bundled on a laptop, and found it worked a lot better for data. Unfortunately, I don't get along that well with laptops, so I bought Roxio for my other machines. (The laptop actually has a faster CD burner than my main desktop, so I sometimes copy the files over to it if I'm burning multiple copies of one or two CDs.)

If you use DOS filenames exclusively, 8-character names + 3-character extensions, the filename problem is minimized, although not removed. While I doubt you'll want to name all your records in 8.3 format, if you should choose to, note that it's legal to have an extension on a DOS folder, but an ISO folder on a CD cannot have a .xxx extension.

On a CD, every file is recorded by it's full path+file, so you could have:

       FolderAA\SubFldrB\Sub2Foldr\Sub3Foldr\Sub4Foldr\...\Filename.xyz

When you burn a DOS 8.3-named data file using ISO standard burn setup, you're limited to 8-deep folder structures, and each folder is limited to 8 characters, so there's still a very real limit on how complex your folder structure can be.

CDs use ISO9660 naming, to convert long filenames to 8.3 format, and you can choose to use that conversion alone. ISO9660 doesn't allow distinguishing between upper and lower case either, so your "Letters" folder, containing "Letters to Businesses," containing "Letters to Plumbers," containing a "Letter to Charley.doc" will be identified on an ISO CD as something like:

       DISKID\LETTERS\LETTER~1\LETTER~5\LETTE~26.doc

(you could probably squeeze one more level in – that string is only 45 characters.) Not much help when you're trying to retrieve a specific letter.

There is a "slash 2" ISO9660 standard that allows long file names, but a lot of CD drives can't read CDs burned to the 9660/2 spec.

You'll probably want to burn your CDs using Joliet conversion. If you use the Joliet filename conversion, long filenames are recorded as a "display name." The ISO 8.3 name is still recorded and used for each file, but when you look for one you'll see a long name. There are one or two characters that are legal in Windows long filenames that are not permitted in Joliet names, so you'll occasionally get an "illegal character" error. That should be rare, but if you have a habit of using "the one illegal one" in a lot of filenames it can be a nuisance.

The bigger problem is that long filenames on a hard drive can be up to 256 characters, and there's no limit to how deep you can go with subfolders; but on a Joliet CD filenames have to be less than 64 characters. There is a limit on the total number of characters in the full path + filename string but I can never remember what it is. The "spec" also prohibits folders more than 8 deep.

The above comes out, for a Joliet burn:

DiskID\Letters\Letters to Businesses\Letters to Plumbers\Letter to Charley.doc

78 characters (including spaces): Probably a legal filename on a Joliet CD in this case, but it's very easy to exceed the limits.

When Nero hits an illegal name/path/depth violation, the versions I've seen only show you the ISO name for the file that's causing the error. It apparently attempts to display the whole path, but usually an illegal runs out of the box, so at best you see:

       diskid\letters\letter~n\letter~n\letter~n\lette~nn.doc.

If you're burning a disk with 3 or 4 hundred "letters" it's not to helpful to know that the problem filename starts with "Lette" since all of the files do. The number given to a particular file depends on what order the program assigned them, and that does not necessarily correlate with the order in which they appear in a Win Explorer or DOS listing.

Nero also makes you exit the burn setup and use Explorer (or other dir/ren function) to change the filename (and probably the folder layout) and then restart.

With Roxio EZCD, the display name and path is shown, a default correction (truncation) is offered, you usually can change the name that's a problem to something else that suits you and continue with the setup (or to the next error). It may still be necessary to exit and start over if you need to change the folder structure to shorten pathnames, but at least you know what file needs to be corrected and what folder its in.

No contest for data CDs. Roxio wins in a walk.

For audio, I have a feeling that Nero is a little easier to use for sorting tracks and such, but I haven't done enough of that to really have much of an opinion.

Note that WinXP has a built-in CD burner utility. The descriptions claim it's pretty much a drag-and-drop process. I have not tried it out, so I don't know how it handles setup errors.

John