Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

K3B is a very good CD/DVD mastering and burning application. I may often be heard to claim that it is the best (hands down) application for such tasks considering any available such application on any platform, even though recently I’ve mostly used Nautilus CD Burner and Brasero¹.

The last version of K3B is as expected better then ever, but it contains this interesting idiosyncrasy: Every time you start the application, a non-modal transient dialog box pops up from the bottom of the interface, saying this:

Quite remarkable that the K3B author thought that reassuring you that your system is still properly configured, is a good idea. I understand if it did it the first time that K3B was launched on some system, but popping up every time is mostly annoying…

Aside from this “feature”, there are plenty of other good features of K3B to commend, one that I really liked in which it shines compared to the competition, is that if you have multiple writers, then instead of showing the hardware identifier for the burner when you want to select the burner to use for this session – as Nautilus CD Burner and Brasero do:

(showing two burners on my computer and I can also target an ISO image)

K3B on the other hand shows you a list of the empty media available for burning, and only for devices that have media inserted:

As can be seen, a tooltip with all the relevant information is presented if you are foolish enough to hover your mouse over the media option.

I would love to see the “create image” option as a media selector and not a checkbox, but as it is I still think its much better then the GNOME burner selection dialog – mostly as if I choose the wrong burner on the GNOME dialog (which I do on occasion) then I get an error dialog prompting me to insert an empty media, and to change the burner device I have to cancel the dialog and that drops me back to the main window from which I have to re-invoke the burning dialog and re-set all the custom options (such as media label) that I’ve done previously.

1. The first is much simpler and enough for most burning jobs, in addition to enjoy a very good integration with my current main desktop environment – GNOME, and the later I’m trying out and comparing to K3B and at this point I can conclude that it has some nice features that K3B could do worse then adopt [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 17:30 and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.