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CDESSENT
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1994-09-08
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CD Essentials
by Madonna Johnson
CD Essentials is Windows software that is advertised as
enabling you to control a CD-ROM drive fast, easily and
automatically. The program can be used to install CD's or it can be
used to automatically launch programs or media on each CD. The
friendly interface looks like a remote control that you would have
lying around your house. The CD has an LCD-like display that shows
the different options available to you and also includes a display
of what types of files are detected on the active CD drive.
CD Essentials includes a multimedia player that resembles a
home entertainment system. The player recognizes AVI Video, MIDI,
WAV, audio, image and Kodak Photo CD files. When any of the above
mentioned files are sensed, the player automatically launches the
appropriate component to play them.
The image player builds thumbnails of any image that you add
to the playlist. You can view these images individually or create a
slideshow to view them. The video player allows you to watch
animation clips by using Microsoft Video for Windows. Creating a
playlist for viewing is much the same as with the image player. You
can view clips in a window or full screen. While experimenting with
the full screen viewer, I experienced several general protection
fault errors due to an obvious incompatibility with my video driver.
Viewing in a window created no problems. The main problem with the
video viewer is that the image of the .AVI file was sometimes
cropped off in the viewing window. Overall, I was very impressed
with the Video/.AVI player interface. It appears to look much like
a TV screen. I sampled it by setting up a playlist as a slide show.
I used some files included with the New Groliers Encyclopedia. Most
of the .AVI files were too big to be played in full screen mode and
any attempt resulted in Windows completely locking up. Many of the
animation clips that I played were animated charts that included
subtitles and brief paragraphs under or on the image. Many of these
were cropped so that parts couldn't be seen.
The controls for both viewers are very simple to use without
even reading the small manual that is provided with the program.
Choices for playing the images can be set to sequence, shuffle, loop
or single play. Each of these options plays the files exactly like
it says. Sequence displays the files as they appear in the
playlist. Shuffle will randomly choose files from the playlist and
play each one until everything in the queue has played. Loop will
continuously play images until you manually stop it, while single
simply plays one file.
The MediaRak includes an Audio player that includes a Mixer
Module, CD Module, DAT (Digital Audio Transport) Module and a MIDI
Module. You can listen to your favorite musical CDs while working
in other Windows applications. Once a CD is playing, the main power
can be shut off and you will exit the program and the CD will
continue to play using the playlist and command that you have set.
This allows memory to be freed up for other programs that you are
running. The DAT Module lets you play and record digital audio
files in .VOC or .WAV file formats. The MIDI module lets you play
MIDI files using a built-in synthesizer and/or through an external
MIDI connector. You can record song files from an external keyboard
as well. The accompanying MIDI Orchestrator allows you to modify or
edit each track in a MIDI file.
The Audio Player uses a familiar stereo interface that makes
it easy to work with sound files. You can easily play audio tracks
from your CD-ROM drive by controlling your sound card mixer
functions and by creating playlists for digital audio, MIDI and CD
audio. You have the same playback option modes as with the Video
Player.
The systems requirements according to the documentation are:
A multimedia PC that includes a 386SX or better microprocessor, a
CD-ROM drive and an audio board, VGA or SVGA display with 256
colors, minimum 4 megabytes of RAM, Microsoft Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS
3.1 or later. The minimum hard drive space needed is 4 MB.
My system is currently running in VGA mode. When the viewer
didn't show the whole screen on the .AVI files that I experimented
with, I chose the option to view in full screen. Each time I did,
my system either locked up completely or I experienced a general
protection fault. I was unable to determine whether the
incompatibility was due to my video driver or other circumstance.
Phoenix Technologies advertises to offer free technical
support, but the registration card offers an option to waive support
in lieu of receiving your choice of several of their books or other
software packages.
In my opinion CD Essentials is a very good program. I did
find it very similar in many ways to the remote control software
that comes bundled with SoundBlaster multimedia kit. Many of the
features are duplications of software that people may already have
if they purchased an entire multimedia kit. For those who bought
their hardware individually this could be the answer for them.