文章基本信息

标题：HyCD's play&record 1.3 - Product Announcement
作者：David Doering
期刊名称：Event DV
印刷版ISSN：1554-2009
出版年度：1999
卷号：May 1999
出版社：Online, Inc.

HyCD's play&record 1.3 - Product Announcement

David Doering

learning software is just too darn hard. All too often, I get my hands on a seemingly wonderful product, then discover that the bloated number of options on multiple screens, scant help, and lack of tech support make the product unusable. Sure, a techno-junkie like me can figure it out ... eventually. But what about the vast number of regular users out there? Are they going to want to wade through cryptic procedures to get something done? Probably not.

To my great surprise, the latest suite of CD recording tools from HyCD, Inc. (a.k.a., Creative Digital Research)--developer of cross-platform products for recording within UNIX, Macintosh, and PC operating systems--so thoroughly breaks the mold that it may set a new standard by which similar products will be judged and ultimately imitate.

so simple even a novice can play

Normally, I'd go right into a discussion of a product's features. In this case, though, it's important to delineate what makes working with Play&Record so wonderful. After all, we've seen easy-to-install products featuring UDF support. We've also seen MP3 recorders, players, encoders, and decoders, not to mention wizards, which significantly improve a product's user-friendliness. But what HyCD has done with Play&Record is brilliant--and the picture of simplicity itself.

Specifically, HyCD has eliminated the program interface entirely. Wondering how HyCD could achieve the impossible, I was pleased to find no surprises during installation. There's a new HyCD icon in the System tray at the bottom of the screen, but it just pulls up a registration screen--no tools apparent there. Then I inserted a blank CD-R disc into my Philips CDD 3610 CD-R/CD-RW recorder and encountered a message in plain English such as rd never seen in a CD-R tool before.

HyCD has actually simplified the choices for the media menu to the point of eliminating even the possibility for confusion. Instead of reading the obligatory "Check here to create a data CD available as a drive letter" message, Play&Record asks, "Do you want this CD to act like a floppy?" The alternative is to treat the blank disc like an audio CD. Compared with other programs, which refer to drive letters and such, this plain English approach is refreshing.

At the heart of Play&Record is its MP3 and music CD recording capability. It includes the FX program, which converts LP, tape, and audio files to CD format; a Sampler to convert MP3 to CD format; and an Encoder for converting WAV files to MP3 format (this can run as a standalone feature too). But the knock-your-socks-off part is in the software's recording capability and integration with Windows Explorer.

Believe it or not, this is all the interface you need to record MP3 files to a music CD. Just copy and paste to the drive. In a technical triumph, HyCD's Play&Record software functions with just two new menu options in the Windows Explorer pop-up menu. The HyCD Copy option even recognizes an MP3 file, so when you paste to a blank CD-R disc, it knows that you want to create a music CD out of the disc. It will then automatically convert the file from MP3 to CD format and add it to the music on the CD.

Remarkably, there's no separate application and no wizard, so there's nothing new to learn. Music lovers don't have to sort through the intricacies of MP3, CD formatting, sampling rates, or other technical issues. Sure, this won't serve the needs of some audiophiles, but for the vast number of users, Play&Record finally makes good on the promise to make computers simple. It's dazzling.

Of course, Play&Record shows you the current playlist for the music CD prior to doing the actual recording, so you can change the order if you want. (The product has information on 1.4 million song titles.) After that, you press Record and, within a few minutes, have created a nifty music CD without cracking a manual or learning about buffer underrun. The suite also lets you do WAV-to-CD and CD-to-CD recording as well.

I want my UDF!

Next, I decided to treat a new blank disc as a floppy. Now, I knew that this option placed UDF formatting on the blank CD-R, but many other users wouldn't care about what UDF is. However, pretty much everyone understands how floppies and Zip disks work, so the software's plain English approach will definitely make UDF more appealing to a wide audience. After I selected the floppy option from the main menu, my new UDF-enabled CD-R acted like a big floppy disk, allowing me to drag-and-drop files as I would using a floppy or Zip disk. [It also let me delete files from it as well.) This feature mirrors most UDF packages.

Play&Record is different, though, in its use of the latest UDF version [2.0), giving it a competitive advantage over products like Adaptec's DirectCD, which only supports up to UDF 1.5. The newer UDF version demands fewer power calibrations on a drive and thus increases the usability of a CD-R/CD-RW disc. More importantly, it fully supports Windows' security Access Control Lists, making it a sizzling solution for computer backups and network users.

Unlike the competition, however, HyCD doesn't yet provide a UDF reader for distribution to other workstations not using the HyCD driver. So if you want to share this disc with other users, they will need the Play&Record software as well. Also, the UDF portion works with fewer recorders than the MP3 option, though both support a handful of recorders, including Hewlett-Packard's internal 7200 model, Mitsumi's 4801 and 4802, Plextor's PX-R412C and 820, Philips' 3610, and Yamaha's CD-R 4260, 4261, 2216, and 4416 recorders.

One other limitation to the tool affects Windows 95 users. If you use Internet Explorer as your browser, you'll need to have at least version 4.01 (with Service Pack 1.0) to use the full capabilities of Play&Record. Netscape users will unfortunately have to install the full IE4.01 to do the same thing, even if you never use IE. These difficulties aren't HyCD's fault, however. The IE upgrade fixes a number of existing problems within Windows Explorer, which limits using folders with Play&Record. Windows 98 users don't need to worry about this, nor will Windows NT users when HyCD releases its NT version of Play&Record later this year.

Working in Play&Record's favor is its significant help section. With more than 42MB of multimedia video/audio help files available, you might not want to keep all of it on-hand all the time; for novice users, however, it's must-have training. And since the help section is interactive, watching the onscreen simulations makes it dead-easy to run the program in real life. Kudos to HyCD for this one. One caveat: You'll need a browser with an AVI-plug-in to view the video files.

a dream come true (for the most part)

If granted one wish for Play&Record, it would be file system support for ISO 9660 so I'd only have to use one tool for basic CD-R recording. HyCD states that there are already good utilities available for this--including its own HyCD Publisher. Still, it would be nice to reduce those utilities to this level of simplicity.

The HyCD Play&Record suite is not a perfect product, but it is a true innovation that's worth its weight in gold for mainstream users. Although Play&Record doesn't support ISO 9660 recording, its abundant help section, transparent integration with Windows Explorer, and ease-of-use will certainly help transform CD-R and CD-RW recording from a technician's trick to a mainstream treat. For network users, its unique Windows ACL support makes it the only recording package to choose, and music lovers will find it incredibly addictive. At less than $60 for both MP3 and UDF recording (a price some other vendors charge just for UDF support), this is a Grammy winner.