Ok, to put a long story short, in this topic I'm making room for my frustration regarding Nero. The software and the company behind it.
As a Nero user, I'm concerned about it's quality. And because there are some issues that worry me for some time, and didn't change with the v6 release, I have decided to send a mail to Ahead.
This is what I wrote:
Hi!
Nero is great... blah, blah... you know all that so I won't bother :-).
But there are three things that drive my mad:
1 - An option for default 0 sec pauses between audio tracks.
2 - Choosing between "start multisession" "continue" and "no
multisession" doesn't change correctly in the "Burn/Action" tab. Yes,
I'm talking about the checking/unchecking "Finalize CD" and choosing the
correct writing method. :)
3 - That gay volume label naming system. I change the name in the
complilation and only the Joliet name gets changed, the ISO doesn't get
changed.
I hope you can do something about it, it shouldn't be that difficult.
;-)
Oh, and it would be nice if the updates would be REALLY updates - that
means a couple of MB and not the whole 20MB release. It's not a problem
for me but I know there are some (actually a lot of) people that find it
a bit painfull to download the whole release on a 56k modem.;-)
Thanks for all your hard work, Regards - Matus "Gambit" Vojtek
P.S. - I recommend you to visit the great boards at
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ . A lot of Nero discussion happens there.
And the response I got:
Dear valued customer,
thank you for your email.
1) a) You get a very short pause if you don't split the wav-file correctly.
The separation should be at a sample position which is divisible by (2352/4). If not you can get a pause of 1/75s. Please take a
look (e.g. with CoolEdit) at the end of the sample you write and delete the silent section of the wav-file.
b) This can also be caused by a poor read from the source drive used to extract the song from an Audio CD, before writing to the CD.
To avoid this, use your recorder as both source and destination for the extraction and write process.
c) And this can be caused by corrupted audio files. Use Nero’s WAV Editor to clean up the ending of the song.
Also:
Please visit our website at www.nero.com for step by step directions on how to remove the 2 second pause or Pregap
Use the below link to go to the exact location where our How To guides are located:
http://www.nero.com/en/index.html#c1034059030144
And look under 'create an Audio CD' .
You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or later to open these files. You can download this for free from Adobe's website at http://www.adobe.com
2) launch Nero and then you can choose between these options, and Nero identify if there is a multisession disk on the drive.
3) that is ISO, that means under standard, you only copy the files with his name, he doesn´t make changes between copied and basic files.
But special thanks for your effort, this is great how you want to help us. We need feedback from our customers for improve our
product.
Should you have any other request or wish more information please do not hestitate to contact us.
best regards
Alphan Cakir
Support
Ahead Software AG
Im Stoeckmaedle 18
76307 Karlsbad
Germany
Fax : ++49 (0)7248 911 888
http://www.nero.com
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I think you can guess, that I was not very happy with this answer, so I mailed them again:
wtf is this? it completely misses the point of my mail!!!
Gambit
And the reply:
Dear Customer,
Thank you for your email.
Please uninstall the existing version of Nero/install Nero 5.5.10.42(not Nero 6) by doing the following…it may address your issues.
The entire process will not cost you anything.
First make sure you have your Nero 5 serial key to install Nero/Nero Express with. It should look like 15xx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxx. It should be located on the inside of the Nero Jewel case, or on the back of the paper sleeve the Nero CD came in. You can also go into your Registry, and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and under SOFTWARE_AHEAD_NERO BURNING-ROM_INFO obtain your Nero 5 serial key from here.
Then download NeroClean Tool from ftp://ftp9.nero.com/attach/Nero-CleanTool.zip
to your desktop. Unzip the file and then double click on the EXE file to run. Select 'Clean All' option and then click on the 'Clean' button to Uninstall all Nero products. And then reboot your system. It will clean the registry and remove all Nero entries.
After that download and install Nero 5.5.10.42 from our website at www.nero.com <http://www.nero.com>. Click on the “downloads” drop down menu, on the left side, click on “updates>previous versions”. On the right side, click on “Previous versions of Nero”. This will bring you to the “download page” showing “Nero551042.exe” to download. Use your Nero 5 serial key to unlock from Demo mode.
Best regards
Al Valerio
Ahead Support Team
_________________________________________________________
Office hours are from Monday to Friday 9:00 am to 5:00 pm PST
Ahead Software Inc.
Glendale, CA 91203
FAX: (818) 956 7094
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We highly value your opinion. Please click the link below to enter our Customer Satisfaction voting page:
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Hmm, yeah you guess it, still not it. So another mail went on it's way to Ahead...
I have to admit, at first I was really pissed off by your response, but it's getting really ridiculous now.
I'm eager to see what comes next;-)
Gambit
As usual, a week later a reply was in my mail box:
Dear Customer,
Thank you for your email.
Please give us a call at 888-309-4212 so we can further assist you with your problem. Mon-Fri 8am-5pm PST California, USA.
Best regards
Al Valerio
Ahead Support Team
_________________________________________________________
Office hours are from Monday to Friday 9:00 am to 5:00 pm PST
Ahead Software Inc.
Glendale, CA 91203
FAX: (818) 956 7094
______________________________
Vote:
X-Vote: http://213.144.20.201/CrmQm/Customer.php?f_sData=YT0xJm09MTEyNDU0JnU9MzImbD0y
And still, no real reply to my mail... Of course I ain't going to waste my money to call somebody in the USA who, for sure, won't be able to help me.
So I decided to at least post it her for your amusement. Your comments are welcome.
P.S.: One last thing. Looking back at Nero 6, I realize how rushed this release was. The amount of bugs (I think I don't have to start listing them, everybody reading this forum knows about them), the delay of NeroDigital etc. make me think of the "release buggy app fast vs release stable app slow" issue.
Anyway, I just wanted to share this with you, and maybe, but just maybe, finally hope for an answer...
[span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'] And because this is Off-Topic... I do it TRL style: Hi, I wanna give a shout out to all the sick and horny nerds in the IRC channel that helped my with this :B [/span]