Many PC users would argue that the removable storage market is dominated by magnetic, magneto-optical, or tape drives. So, where does this leave recordable CD-Rom formats such as CD-R and CD-RW? If Adaptec, best known for producing staid SCSI interface cards, has anything to do with it, CD-R will be seen as a 'fun' media for creating multimedia art, rather than simply for backing up data.
The company was targeting 'average users with CD-R drives' with its Easy-CD Creator 3.5 software, David Ulmer, general manager of the company's Software Products Group, said.
Although the software can be used to back up hard-drive data, Adaptec is pushing CD-R as a way of storing data, audio or video creations, probably because it is a write-once format.
Audio CDs created by the Easy-CD software can be used with CD players or CD-Rom drives, while 'on-the-fly' sound-editing tools enable recordings to be edited before being burned on to CDs.
One such feature is called GenderBlender, which allows users to alter the voices of male singers to sound like females, or vice versa, without changing the tempo of the song. The package also contains more conventional noise-removal tools.
The program also can create autoplay-capable discs which hold picture albums accessible through a Web browser, or self-running video greeting cards.