German software house Ashampoo offers a surprising number of utilities for disc burning, in addition to a raft of other products, including system- and hard-drive optimizers. The company's Burning Studio is still available in its previous version 10 for $39.99, but of course we wanted to check out the latest and greatest: Version 11, which costs $49.99. Ashampoo Burning Studio 11  adds support for smartphones, social networks, cloud services and modern multi-core processors. Both versions can burn Full HD Blu-ray, and both go beyond mere burning by letting you create menu systems for your disks. They'll also rip and burn audio CDs and compress movies to fit DVDs.

Signup and Setup
You can download a 30-day full trial version, and the 176MB installer, compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, is available in 20 languages. After accepting the license terms, you choose Express or Custom installation—I recommend the latter, since Express installs a toolbar and changes your browser home page and search provider. Once the setup app goes through its motions, you'll have the choice of starting the app or a gadget. I did both, and I found that the gadget required some more installing. 

Interface
The program's interface looks more like that of a large software suite rather than a simple burning utility. It’s close but not quite as slick as suites from Nero or CyberLink, but at least you can change its color theme. Version 11 introduces a new compact mode to minimize screen footprint; it actually takes a little while to switch between the two interfaces: it's almost like launching another program. The compact version is simply a circle with the words "Drag&Drop files to burn here!" And don't forget that desktop gadget: It can launch either interface, and has three main buttons: Files, Movies, and Copy, all of which open the larger interface.

Every activity you can start from the main interface and perform in Burning Studio takes the form of a wizard operation: You'll always see Back and Next buttons to handhold you along in the processes. The program's installer also adds itself to the AutoPlay box that pops up when you insert media, blank or full, into your optical drive. In all, it's a much slicker interface, with more choices, than you get with NCH Express Burn ($39.95, 3.0 stars)

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More than Just Burning
Burning Studio's nine main menus offer a wealth of options for burning both data and media to all types of optical media, including CD, DVD, and Blu-ray. The first two option sets are about writing data to disc. The first lets you create or update a simple data disc, with an optional auto-start feature. The second is for backup, letting you span multiple discs with a set of data files. Next come the music activities: you can create an audio CD that will play on any CD player, an MP3 disc, copy music files as data for PC playback, or rip a CD's music to files on your PC.

Movie burning options come next, with movie and slideshow authoring, using a prepared movie folder, or simply copying video files to a disc. Full-disc copying, working with disc images, erasing discs, printing labels, and advanced settings like making a disc bootable or Joliet round out the program's options.

Music
In testing Ashampoo's audio-disc capabilities, I first tried creating an MP3 DVD with Burning Studio. I'd hope to be able to just add a top-level folder containing nested folders with MP3s, but I had to go in and add the actual music files into the folders I'd added. A helpful touch was the thermometer control at the bottom that told me how much of the disc my files would take up. My project was of 371MB, with 111 files. The program went through a 10-minute converting process, presumably to change the bitrate, even though the files were already in MP3 format (other audio formats weren't accepted). I'd have preferred an option to leave the bitrate at the source's setting. It then took just under four minutes to burn on my 3.4GHz quad-core test machine with 4GB RAM, writing to 16X DVD-R media.

When ripping a CD to PC files, Burning Studio first correctly added the album name and track titles, and then could produce MP3, WAV, or WMA files. I could also change the bitrate to from 8kbps to 320kbps. My 14 track CD of 60 minutes (Buena Vista Social Club) took just 2:02 minutes to rip to 192kbps MP3s. Unlike iTunes or Windows Media player, however, it didn't show me which song was being ripped, just a big green progress bar. The result sounded superb.