Nero 7 Premium

This package ventures beyond disc burning, into digital media and home entertainment

Similar to Roxio Creator 8 (see page 64), Nero 7 Premium is an all-in-one digital media and home-entertainment solution that helps you create, burn, edit, share and organise your movies, music and photos.

The package comprises 18 separate applications linked by Nero’s Startsmart launcher system.

Startsmart has a task-based interface, so you simply tell it what you’re trying to do (burn an audio CD, copy a DVD movie and so on), and Nero chooses the best application for the job. If it all gets too complicated, you can click on the Favourites section of Startsmart where the most common tasks are listed.

At the heart of the program is Nero Burning Rom 7 and the more user-friendly Nero Express 7, both of which let you create audio, data, photo and video discs.

Little has changed in these programs since Nero 6 but there are subtle improvements, such as support for high-capacity Blu-ray and HD-DVD data discs. It also supports HP’s Lightscribe technology, which lets you burn labels directly to a disc using compatible drives.

The most significant new addition to Nero 7 Premium is Nero Home – the company’s first foray into media playback. This personal video recorder (PVR) application works in a similar manner to Windows XP Media Center Edition, allowing you to listen to music, view images, and (if you have a TV tuner) watch and record live television.

It isn’t as accomplished as some rival programs (it lacks electronic programming guide (EPG) support), but it’s easy to install and configure and uses a ‘10ft user interface’ so you can control it from a distance using your TV tuner’s remote control.

Nero Scout is a complement to Nero Home that works by automatically cataloguing all your media files for easy access. It’s a great idea, but the cataloguing process is rather slow.Nero Vision 4 – another part of the Nero 7 Premium suite – lets you create DVD movies.

It isn’t as polished as Adobe Premier Elements, for example, but it supports DVD menus and chapters and should be adequate for the average user wanting to create basic DVD movie discs.

Naturally, Nero Vision 4 supports mpeg4 video, but we were disappointed at the lack of support for the popular DivX file format.

The other major inclusion in Nero 7 Premium is Nero Backitup 2. This allows users to run scheduled backup operations on your PC, and you can specify which file types to exclude from the backup process.

Online backups are supported via file transport protocol (FTP), and you can save password-protected disc images to internal and external discs.

The Nero 7 Premium package is rounded off with Nero Wave Editor 3 and Nero Soundtrax. Both let you easily create and edit all manner of audio projects including basic mix-CDs and 5.1 or 7.1 audio tracks. Wave Editor also lets you record from various sources on your PC, and can be used to capture streaming audio via the Internet.

Despite its wealth of features, we were frustrated by some of the program’s foibles. Its applications don’t share a uniform look and feel disjointed, despite being linked by the Smartstart launcher.

The program was also rather prone to crashing, although Nero plans to release a patch that will improve its reliability.

Nero 7 Premium is by no means perfect. Some may consider it to be a jack of all trades and master of few, but it has a wealth of useful features and is excellent value for money.

System requirements:
800MHz processor
128MB of Ram
600MB of hard disk space
CD or DVD writer