If you want to burn your discs, quickly, using the latest media suites can take a time to get to the correct application. Many of us simply want to create an audio CD for the car, minutes before we head off on a journey. Whereas many of the commercial burning suites are more like media production suites, free burning tools are designed to get the job done as quickly as possible with the minimum of fuss.

CDBurnerXP has been around for ages. Indeed, it hasn’t had a major update in years, but it used to be the free burning solution of choice. It’s still free, although the developer is asking for donations to encourage future development. It would be up to you how much you choose to donate.

CDBurnerXP is now up to v4 and, as well as being fully Vista compatible, it should enable you to burn any kind of disc, from CD through to Blu-ray. If you want, you could even produce a mixed audio CD, by burning the tracks so they do not have a space between. There is an option to produce a bootable disc, so you could even create a self-contained disc that does not rely on the host operating system.

As it’s free, it’s worth checking against your current burning solution.