Arguably, this is less a measure of how fast Ashampoo Burning Studio is than how bloated other software has gotten. It took about twice as long - still remarkably fast for this type of software. Just for fun, I also tested it on a ten year old Windows XP machine I have lying around. In fact the entire process, from starting the install to opening the program at the end, took just under two minutes. Lightweight Software & Unified Interface The first thing I noticed about this software was how quickly it installed. While Ashampoo Burning Studio doesn't give you all the options and settings found in similar software, such as Nero or TMPGEnc, what it does offer may surprise you. What you get is a simple, lightweight program to use them. So if it uses all these free components, you might be wondering what, exactly, you get for $50. Those are free products, aside from any patent licensing. Where bigger software companies either develop their own encoders and decoders, or more commonly buy off the shelf third party components, Ashampoo uses software like FFmpeg and LAME.

That reason is some of the same open source tools I use all the time. What I didn't know then was that the reason for that price. For just $49.99, it promises to perform many of the same operations as software costing twice as much or more. To be honest, when I was asked to review Ashampoo Burning Studio 11, I wasn't expecting to be impressed in the least. If you are one of those people, Ashampoo Burning Studio may be worth a look.

For the average person it's simply not worth the trouble to invest the time necessary. For someone like me who is willing to invest a lot of time finding the best tools and putting together a collection of specialized software for various video, audio, and burning tools, the best results can usually be had using free and open source tools. The problem is most of those tools don't offer any improvement over the open source software you can get for free. Over the last several years, a wide variety of software has entered the market designed for creating discs in a multitude of multimedia formats.

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