Each of us has his own ideas about free software

We can speak a lot about long list of advantages and disadvantages of free source products but we cannot forget about one important thing - freedom of choice such software provide. If you do not like one program you can easily try another product with same or similar functionality as it is free and sometimes are better than commercial solutions. That's why we decided to investigate deeply free burning software for optical discs which can compete with the paid versions and which are usual or common software for each PC user. InfraRecorder OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 Program for recording CD and DVD is open-source software and supports ISO, BIN / CUE - disk images. InfraRecorder can operate with rewritable and multisession optical disks and is able to find necessary language with Audio CD and double-layer DVD. Has disk cloning and check it for errors features. Windows Explorer interface style is one of features of this application. Program supports more than forty languages. In addition to the standard edition of the utility for 32- and 64-bit platforms there is a portable version of InfraRecorder on the developer Qingdao Christian site which works from any flash drive. BurnAware Free OS: Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7 Is a tool for 'burning' CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. Built in software functionality allows you to record Audio-CD, DVD-Video and MP3-CDs, create bootable or multi-media or create ISO images. BurnAware Free provides automatic updating via the Internet and data verification mechanism for making sure that the process went smoothly. Applications trying to implement 'Ask' toolbar so please check if you really need it. Please note that BurnAware Free is not able to create exact copies of CD and DVD -this feature is present in the commercial versions of the product and is beyond the scope of our review. Nero 9 Lite OS: Windows XP/Vista/7 This is lite version of the well-known package for recording CDs Nero Burning ROM. Customers who like Nero products and ready to have limited version can try this free software. Program can write CD and DVD, copy them, clean the discs and display information about the discs only. Nero 9 Lite application created to bring customers to the full paid version Nero and that's why there are a lot of dialog boxes which encourage users to opt for a commercial product. Nero 9 Lite will also ask you to install 'Ask' toolbar into your Internet Explorer browser. You can remove unwanted components from the Windows control panel of course but the fact of force a toolbar is alarming. ImgBurn OS: all versions of Windows, Linux (when you use Wine shell) One of the most powerful tools to work with CD, DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray discs format. ImgBurn supports next formats BIN, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI which allows user to create audio files in MP3, MP4, MPC, OGG, PCM, WAV, WMA and others. It works with any optical drive and can control data record quality. The program has a huge number of parameters which allow user very flexible manipulate with the utility characteristics and configure it in his own way. There is a special window where all the operations performed by ImgBurn recorded and could be seen. There is a sense to recommend this program for the beginners but advanced PC owners will not like it. Conclusion The chose is really big and you can try all of them which grant you a lot of experience you haven't before. Some of the programs are good - other bad, some of them fast - other slow, some of them easy to learn - other for highly skilled persons. Good luck in your free optical disk data writing process!