NTI Media Maker Express Review

Full review

When you’re looking for a disc burner you need it to be fast, simple, and feature-packed. NTI Media Maker scores well on two out of three of these requirements – take a look at our review to find out more. NTI Corporation has been around since 1995 and this California company has a good reputation in data storage and digital media – does Media Express meet the grade?

Setup

Installation is relatively easy for NTI Media Maker Express. With the clear and easy to read set up instructions you simply follow along and install the program into an available folder, then start the burning process by opening the One-Touch Launchpad.

Disc burning

The NTI Media Maker Express feature set is not the most extensive we have seen. But the basics are covered - you can burn DVD Video, DVD Video_TS, VCD/SVCD, Audio CD, WMA Disc, DVD, and copy CDs and DVDs between formats with no loss of data. There is no function for burning to Blu-ray disc, however.

The start-up screen – called the One-Touch Launchpad - displays a cheerful, bold set of icons split into Video, Data, Audio, Copy, and Utilities sections. Simply click on one of these icons to go to the relevant set of tasks and configurations. As you click on an icon, a second menu of options appears where you can choose the type of disc you want to burn and the specific configurations you want to set. The program is easy to pick up as most of the options are set out in the same way, with the same sequence of choices to make in order to burn the disc or carry out a particular task. There are not many options for burning discs but some configurations can be set.

The NTI Media Maker Express package includes a useful multiburner for duplicating your discs to multiple drives at the same time, considering you have these drives installed on your computer. And we also like the Session Explorer, a utility that allows you to check out the data sessions on a disc so you can recover lost data if the disc was damaged at some point.

Security

No security or encryption features with NTI Media Maker Express.

Features

NTI Media Maker Express has a couple of interesting features to help you create audio discs and maximize the amount of data you can fit onto discs.

Audio features – Media Maker Express helps you label your songs with CD-Text and provides a normalization features to keep the volume consistent throughout the album. The crossfade feature gives an audio CD a DJ-like sound. With Media Maker Express you can also record audio directly from your microphone to a disc. Use this feature to record copies of your old vinyl or cassette tapes, or record voice messages.

Data disc spanning – The Data Disc feature makes short work of putting your data files onto backup CDs. You don’t have to calculate how many files will fit onto a single disc; the system automatically puts data onto an available disc and lets you know when to add a new disc to continue burning.

Ease of use

The One-Touch Launchpad is indeed easy to use, as you would expect. Whether or not you are familiar with disc burning software, you’ll be able to easily navigate the choices you need to make. Each step is broken down with a Wizard-like process so you don’t get lost at any point. Drag and drop functionality for files makes it easier to move things around on the screen, and it’s a nice touch that you can add favorites to the Launchpad to get to your preferred tasks more quickly.

Help & support

You don't have an extensive list of options to choose from in terms of technical support, but there is a Tech Support Contact form that you can fill out. But with no online manual, a very limited set of FAQs and no other resources for the software owner, you are pretty much on your own with this package.

Overall

If you’re concerned that you won’t be able to understand a disc burning suite, this is a good choice. NTI Media Maker Express is one of the easiest disc burning software packages to use, and all points in the process are simple and straightforward. If you are more of an expert, you may be disappointed in the lack of features NTI Media Maker Express provides.