When was the last time you bought a software package that came on 15 CDs? How about 15 identical CDs? Depending on the depth of your relationship with PCs, this is either utter lunacy or unparalleled genius.

Automagic CD-R from Orlogix is for people who want to put their stuff onto CDs, but don’t know, and really don’t want to know, how to do it. There’s loads of supposedly easy to use CD burning software around and most versions of Windows have plenty of CD-burning functionality built in.

For some people that’s still not enough. If you don’t want to have to search through program menus or install software or basically think, then Automagic CD-R just hands it all to you on a plate.

In the box you get a quick start guide, a CD-labelling pen and fifteen discs. These are, in fact, specially-created discs containing a CD-Rom section and a 700MB recordable area. The CD-Rom section contains simple CD recording software that launches automatically when the disc is inserted.

The opening menu presents you with four recording options: Photos, Music, My Documents and Any Data. Other options give you the chance to learn more about the software, explore the CD or select your operating language.

Selecting Photos, let’s you drag and drop images or automatically scan your hard drive for pictures. You can then preview and optionally rotate images before hitting the record button.

Here you can elect to finalise the disc and prevent further recording to it.
Hitting the button records your pictures to disc. There are no options or settings to deal with; it just gets on with it. Re-inserting the disc allows you to run the software again and add additional files in a similar manner.

The software really is rather simple; perhaps a little too simple. For example, selecting a My Documents backup can’t deal with your data if it exceeds the capacity of a single disk. You’re left having to selectively remove data yourself.

The necessity to keep the physical size of the software to a minimum also precludes the use of fancy animated graphics and wizards, so it does appear rather dry and uninviting.

Keeping everything ultra-simple means you don’t get to create audio or video CDs, and the system’s not suitable for making direct copies of one CD from another.

Ease of use is the only reason for this product to exist, and thankfully it is indeed pretty easy. At no point do you have to know anything, all you need to do is select from short menus obey simple instructions.

At £20 for 15 discs, the Starter Kit is a lot more expensive than learning how to burn CDs for yourself. However, the refill pack contains 50 discs for £34.99. That’s approaching half the price per disc.

The very purpose of the software is to make items such as the manual superfluous, so if you don’t need the marker pen, you may as well just go straight for the refill pack.

Also consider:
Pioneer BDR-101A Blu-ray drive
A good first-generation Blu-ray drive, but most would be wise to hold on to their money for the moment

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