Nero AG - Nero 9 review

Just like its once-rival, Easy CD Creator (now Roxio Creator 2009), Nero is an application suite no longer content to simply burn your CD and DVD discs and walk away. Instead, Nero 9 is now a bunch of applications, all well held together by the StartSmart screen.

From the aforementioned screen you can jump to all of Nero's key functions via a well organised menu system. Tabs on the left-hand side offer choices between the likes of data burning, disc copying and backing up, while the menu at the top of the screen presents more generic, task-based tab descriptions such as Rip and Burn, Create and Edit and Back Up. It's actually a thoughtful way to keep both beginners and more advanced users happy via the same screen. Each tab offers a clearly-described sub-menu and it's an easy program to navigate.

This simplicity follows when you jump into any of the suite's individual programs. The guts of how to burn a disc, for instance, haven't changed in any dramatic way in some time, and sensible drag and dropping is still the best way to put either a data or music disc together.

The software keeps the more advanced options out of your way until you want to go and find them yourself, which is never too tricky, and it packs a lot of flexibility and power under the surface (although you need to spend a little extra if you want to buy a plug-in for Blu-ray support). It's also unfussy in the way it goes about its work.

But then it was last year, too. And the year before that. And this leads to the inevitable question that surrounds Nero 9: just what's new?

Not enough, as it happens. Most of the core functionality remains pretty much the same, albeit with a bit of paint here and there. Sure, you can now backup online, should you so choose, but that's a minor addition to a suite that most people buy, surely, to burn discs. If anything, it's taken a little more out than it's put in.

There's another factor, too. The installation is easily one of the longest we've ever seen for any software product, Windows included. We installed from a download version, so there wasn't even an optical drive to read from, and it took well over half an hour on a fast dual core system. We repeated this on an E6800-powered machine with 4GB of RAM, and again, another half an hour clocked up. Why? What exactly is the software doing?

Nero 9 has attracted a fair degree of criticism across online forums from regular customers, and it's not tricky to see why. There's not much of an upgrade here, and an argument that by some measures it's a downgrade. Yet for the new customer it's still a grand piece of software that's an excellent companion on your burning adventures. £60 is a lot to ask for it, though.