SOFTWARE REVIEW

Fireman 2.0 CD/DVD Burner

RATINGS Quality Geekness

Fireman 2.0 from Honest Technology is a basic CD and DVD recording utility that should handle your day to day burning tasks. If you are looking for a full featured media management suite to edit, play, and record music and video then stop reading here; Fireman is not your tool. If your needs are for basic burning features for low cost (or free) then Fireman may work for you.

The features of Fireman 2.0 include:

• Making data CDs and DVDs
• Burning audio and MP3 CDs
• Burning video DVDs and video CDs
• Burning ISO images
• Making disk labels

That's it ... and for many people that's enough.

The main screen illustrates this simplicity:

The user interface was clearly not built with power users in mind, but it is easy to follow and gets the job done nicely. And with that in mind let's move on to the tasks.

The interfaces for burning both data and audio discs is similar. In both cases there is a simple drag-and-drop or dialog box-based interface for adding files and folders and controls for reorganizing the files before burning.

Once the files have been added and organized you simply select your recording device from the list of available burners and hit the Burning button.

There's a progress bar to show where you stand in terms of size. One missing feature that even most simple burning programs have is an estimated time to completion; however, these aren't generally all that accurate anyway.

In terms of burner support there seems to be good coverage of any Windows-supported burning device. The Plextor USB burner that was a problem on my test system for an older version of Nero worked just fine with Fireman. For rewriteable media Fireman provides an erase button on both the Burning screen and the Utilities screen. It would have been nice to have a prompt for erasing old media when you select Burn rather than having to do it manually, but no big deal.

There are functions on the utility screen for making and burning CD ISO images. The Make ISO Image function works just like burning a CD but creates an ISO image file instead. The Burn ISO Image function takes any .iso file and puts in on a CD.

For burning video CDs the interface is the same as for audio CDs: drag and drop your video files and burn. For making DVDs the process is a bit different--and a bit clunky. You basically put a standard DVD folder tree (VIDEO_TS) on your hard drive and then specify the location of the VIDEO_TS folder to burn the DVD. To copy a DVD you need to first copy all of the files from the source DVD to your hard disc manually or use some other DVD ripping utility. It would have been nice to have a feature in Fireman to do this for you.

There is also basic functionality included for creating CD and DVD labels for the disk and jewel case. A selection of templates is included and you can edit the basic text (title, artist, etc.). There is no provision for putting file or track names on the label or cover, which would be nice. It isn't clear what label formats are supported for standard label types.

The user documentation and help are pretty sparse and unfortunately are only available via the Fireman website--there is no local help or documentation. Fortunately, most of the functions are self explanatory, so there isn't really much need for documentation for most functions.

Something interesting that I found out after completing this review is that Honestech has a policy of making the previous version freeware when a new version is released. This means that version 1.4 is now freeware since 2.0 was released. Version 1.4 has all of the features of 2.0 except for dual-layer burning, video burning, and label creation. The 1.4 user interface is virtually identical other than having a bit more basic main screen (no big deal). The freeware version can be downloaded from http://www.ht-fireman.com.

Conclusion
Fireman 2.0 is a very basic CD and DVD burning program that does a pretty good job at what it is designed to do. A 30-day trial version can be downloaded from the Honestech website and from a number of other download sites.

At $39.99 it is priced between the full featured utility suites like Nero and Roxio and the free bundled products that come with new PCs and CD/DVD drives. It does a pretty good job at the functions that it provides, but with the 1.4 version available for free you may want to save your money if you just need a simple burning utility. If you need to burn video DVDs there are a number of better options out there.

Ratings Defense
I give Fireman 2.5 Geekheads out of 5 for Quality. For most basic tasks it gets the job done, but there are some areas like video burning and the help system that are a bit lacking. I would actually give the older 1.4 version 3 to 3.5 Geekheads since it does a more consistently good job for the more limited features that it has (and it is free).

I give Fireman 1 Geekheads for Geekness. This is a very basic utility with no whiz-bang features and a few rough spots. This will get your basic burning jobs done, but you won't be showing it off to your friends.

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