Ashampoo Burning Studio 14 review: A competent burning suite, mildly upgraded

Ashampoo Burning Studio 14 is a nice, but extremely mild, upgrade to what is now one of the longest-lived and competent CD/DVD/multimedia burning suites available for PC. It offers all the usual features: CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning, jewel case and cover editing, movie and slideshow creation, plus backup from PC and mobile devices, and does so for an affordable $50 ($20 to upgrade from a previous version).

New features in version 14 are the ability to write password-protected and encrypted discs, and one-click backup of mobile devices. Alas, the one-click backup seems to accept only an optical disc as a destination. Most of the backups that ABS performs may be stored anywhere, even across the network.

Ashampoo Burning Studio14 is easy-peasy to use and pleasing to the eye.

ABS 14 will create, burn, and also let you browse .iso, img, bin/cue, and its own .ashdisc image files. It also copies non-copy-protected discs and gives you the impression that it will do the same with copy-protected movie discs. It doesn’t, but it won’t say so until it runs into an unreadable sector, which can be well into the process.

The video editing and movie production (menus, themes, etc.) in ABS 14 are basic, but provide all the functionality that most users need. The themes are friendly-looking, but not terribly cutting-edge. For home users, they’re fine, but they won’t impress in the board room. The variety and quality of the transitions for movies and slideshows, however, are very nice.

ABS 14 understands nearly all the major file types, including AVCHD. You can import files into projects as separate scenes, or combine them with a basic but effective single-track editor. You can also burn discs from movies ripped to folders.

Ashampoo Burning Studio 14's video editing is simple but capable.

ABS’s backup capabilities are also rudimentary, but sufficient. It performs backups at the file-level backup to a single large file, which may also be encrypted. You can save them anywhere you want: your hard drive, optical disc, or the network. The device backup routine, as mentioned, only backs up to disc. It did a nice job backing up my Windows Phone 8 phone and my iPad, though only the images in the latter. Android devices are also supported.

There are still plenty of uses for optical drives, so if you have the need for a well-rounded suite that fully supports the technology, Ashampoo Burning Studio 14 deserves a look. If you don’t need the movie editing, image browsing and other advanced features, there’s also a free edition of Burning Studio that’s very competent.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder review: Organize your playlists—for a price

You're an audiophile and a neat freak. Years of burning CDs onto your computer have left your digital music library a tattered mess of unnamed tracks by unknown artists—and it's driving you nuts.

You can go through and name them one by one, but that would be an annoying slog, and it wouldn't solve the blank album cover problem. Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder to the rescue!

Adding songs to the program is an easy process using one of the five options.

MP3 Cover Finder works well, there's no doubt about that. It found art for every obscure song I could throw at it, pulling from sources including Amazon, Bing, Google, and iTunes to find the correct cover art and track information. If it couldn't use its fingerprint technology to identify the MP3 via metadata and file names, it still came up with the best match from all the information provided.

In my cruelest test, I used an unreleased song for which the artist is presumed but not confirmed and the title is just a rumor. It managed to find some generic cover art of the presumed band photos as well as some fan-made art for the song. The service works great.

Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder couldn't be simpler to use, either. Clicking the "Add" button brings up five different ways to add songs: a single file, a whole folder, your dedicated music folder, drag and drop, or from your iTunes. The songs load up, and the software asks if you'd prefer to find the covers immediately or later. The process could take anywhere from two to ten minutes depending on how many songs you choose: It's off scouring the Internet and file data for the correct information, and these things take time.

The program will load up the songs and scour the internet for the proper covers and data. Be patient!

Hitting the Optimize button lets you select which tracks to change and which options to apply. It automatically clears any manual data and selects the highest rated cover to apply, so you don't have to manually select data for each song.

Despite its usefulness and simplicity, there are major drawbacks. The initial price is $30 for a one-year license. After that you'll have to extend it, presumably by paying for another year, to continue using the product. That's a hefty subscription just to organize your music library. The changes stay in effect, of course, so any improvements made remain after your subscription expires.

Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder lets you store only 1000 songs at one time as well. Throwing your entire library into the fray takes a few steps. You can load all your songs, optimize them and find the covers, and then clear them out to make room for others. It's a hassle for those with huge libraries, but won't likely affect the majority.

Vendor Ashampoo doesn't bill the program as a music player by any means, and other than quick preview of the song it shouldn't be used as such. Double-clicking a song begins to play it, but there's no way to queue up more. You can click around while a song is playing to review and edit metadata, but the music player doesn't display the current song that's playing. This makes editing a song manually frustrating and confusing, since you can't be sure if the song you're listening to is the song you have selected without double-clicking again and restarting the song.

The user interface is simple and easy to use. Your songs are on the left, available covers are on the right and all the song's information is in the center.

Those who can't stand the blank covers and mislabeled songs when setting up playlists on a phone or MP3 player will get a kick out of Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder and will make the steep price tag worth it. However, anyone short of being a music organization freak won't get the same value. You'll get a good one-time use for the initial 20-30 songs that have been evading your labeling and then sit dormant until it's time to renew.

Alex covers desktops, everything from fancy to practical. He's also an avid (addicted) gamer and loves following the industry.
More by Alex Cocilova

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Ashampoo Photo Commander 11's may features add up to a disappointing image editing experience

A feature list is a tempting, treacherous marketing tool. Just because a product can do something, doesn't mean it can do it well. Case in point, Ashampoo Photo Commander: This "do-it-all" photo tool has an enviable list of features that includes anything from 3D image support to a MiniMap to eliminate scrollbars, and yet ends up feeling underpowered, clunky, and disappointing.

By default, Ashampoo's interface is crowded, and features ads for the company's other products.

Ashampoo' Photo Commander's glut of features carries through to its default window arrangement: a menu bar, two toolbars, a file browser with its own partially-visible toolbar (that opens on Ashampoo's Pictures library, not your own Pictures folder), image metadata, and a wide timeline with many filtering options. The middle of the window has an area to display the selected image, too, crowded in by all of the other interface elements.

For an application that offers so many features, Ashampoo neglects some of the very basics. For example, it doesn't automatically rotate vertical photos: If you happened to take a photo with your camera turned sideways, Ashampoo will display the photo sideways, even if it contains rotation information. Even Windows Explorer, which doesn't purport to be an image editing application, heeds this rotation metadata and shows images correctly turned.

Ashampoo fails to automatically rotate images according to camera orientation.

Another issue is that Ashampoo Photo Commander feels slow. On a Windows 8 system with an Intel i7-3770K CPU and 32GB of RAM, I had to wait for several seconds until Ashampoo finally displayed all of the thumbnails for a single folder. When I navigated into that same folder using Windows Explorer, the thumbnails appeared instantly, with no perceptible lag at all.

With a bit of work, Ashampoo's interface can be cleaned up, but it still feels slow.

Before Ashampoo tries to tackle complex image editing tasks, it should take care of the basics. With free competitors such as Google's Picasa offering a fast and polished image editing experience, Ashampoo is facing some serious competition. The key to winning may be in the details and fit-and-finish, rather than in adding one more bullet to the feature list.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Ashampoo Photo Converter 2 handles most basic image editing functions

Expatriate Scotsman now living in Wurzburg, Germany, freelance writer, frustrated future bestselling author, obsessed bibliophile. Other interests include trying to understand The Architect in the Matrix movies, decrypting codes and ciphers, and trying to persuade my landlord and my wife to let me have a Highland Cow for a pet.
More by Mark O'Neill

If you work with images, you probably have a lot of editing tools on your computer which cover a wide range of functions. Going back and forth between these programs and loading and re-loading the same image takes up time and energy. So what if you could do away with all of those programs, and instead have all editing functions under one roof? That is what Ashampoo Photo Converter 2 ($15, 40-day free trial) tries to accomplish.

One thing to say up-front is that this is not Photoshop-grade software. Far from it. If you want to remove an unsightly spot on the end of someone's nose, then this is the wrong software for you. Instead Photo Converter 2 tries to cover all the basic nitty-gritty editing functions such as resizing, adding a watermark, rotating, flipping, changing the colors (brightness, contrast, etc) and converting to another image format.

You can perform these functions on either a single file or a batch of files, and specify whether you want the original unedited files deleted or kept. Ashampoo uses the tired cliché of "a Swiss Army Knife" to describe Photo Converter 2 and it does a pretty good job of matching up to that image. I just wish the phrase "Swiss Army Knife" would be permanently retired when it came to developers trying to describe their work.

When installing, the software will attempt to install a browser toolbar and change your homepage and default search engine. To avoid this, choose the custom installation option.  When installed, you also need to click configuration>Service Channel and uncheck "recommendations from the Ashampoo team". Otherwise, every time you close the software, you are going to get a nag screen trying to sell you something else.

Add your desired image or folder of images to begin the editing process.

One of the good things about aShampoo has to be the batch editing. For example, you can choose a folder full of images and once chosen, Ashampoo will load all of the images contained in that folder. From there, you can make one choice which will be instantly applied to all the images. This is especially great if you have holiday photos which need resized to the same height and width.

After spending some time trying out all of the different functions and putting it through its paces, I have found no problems with any of the functions. They all work fine and produce outstanding results.  The only thing I would complain about is that the preview window showing the image is very small, so when you are carefully tweaking animage, it is hard to see exactly if things are looking the way you want them to. Making the window a bit bigger would make this software a lot better.

Despite this little objection, if you are looking for a single piece of software which covers all of the basic editing functions and is fairly priced, and which offers the ability to batch process images, then give Ashampoo Photo Converter a try.

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here