Nero is turning on the heat again with its latest media burning suite, complete with a set of new enhancements and upgrades. Though the Burning Rom remains the main venue for copying discs and burning, Nero followers will instantly notice the additional trappings:the Nero Express or the Startsmart window, which make life even easier.

The full range of creative multimedia tools that came with Nero 7have returned: Nero Vision for video capture and DVD authoring; Photosnap for image editing;Wave Editor and Soundtrax for audio capture, editing and mixing and Nero Recode for converting and encoding files. Also back are Nero's media player, Showtime,and Media Center-style application, Nero Home. With tighter integration with Windows Vista, the Nero 8 offers a comparable experience. The Startsmart window, for example, mimics Vista's Start button with a similar icon.

The Nero Disc Copy gadget allows for drag-and-drop desktop disc creation. The new Rescue Agent utility is a welcome addition. It can extract data from damaged discs and it worked surprisingly well in ourtests.

Those with HD equipment will be able to capture and edit in high definition and even output to HD-DVD or Blu-ray disc with the appropriate burner. At the other end of the scale, users of Youtube or Myspace (or even Nero's equivalent, My Nero) can output video clips directly to the online community oftheir choice. Nero BackltUp enables you to copy and create recovery discs, schedule periodic data backups, and 50 on.

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Perhaps the biggest improvement in Nero 8 is the makeover that has been given to the Startsmart console. In previous versions, Startsmart was something burning can be performed with the Startsmart window itself by clicking on the appropriate icor the left-hand side ofthe screen Start Page, meanwhile, can be customized to include icons for frequently used applications.
It's not massively different to predecessor, but Nero 8 has son useful utilities.