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Bundled Software
Unlike any of its competitors, Plextor drives include their own excellent
software and utilities designed to provide you with a wide range of additional features
that can enhance the drives performance and/or capabilities. Therefore,
unlike a majority of our drive reviews, we have a section that covers bundled
software.
PlexTools Professional
The
PX-716A includes version 2.17 of PlexTools Professional which provides you
with additional options that can enhance the performance of your drive as well
as provide some important features a majority look for in a DVD writer.
Let's take a look at some of them in detail...
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You
can see detailed information on both your drive and media. Drive
information includes features, firmware info and supported read/write speeds
based on specific media. Note the 8MB buffer. This is certainly
nice to see, considering most of the drives that are being released have a
smaller buffer size.
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Now,
the drive settings menu is where a majority would probably go in and play
with. It consists of four tabs: Basic Settings, Advanced Settings, VariRec and Silent Mode. The Basic options menu allows you to change
disc velocity and make adjustments to audio output. The advanced menu
has many key options most would want to check out, including booktype change
for DVD+R and DVD+R DL media. You can disable AutoStrategy and Auto
Insert Notification as well.
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The
VariRec tab is where you can make changes that will affect the quality of your
audio recordings. Now, the SilentMode menu is quite important. As
we will demonstrate later, in order to get the highest read performance,
you'll have to enable this feature and set the load/eject to highest level.
However, this will make your drive incredibly noisy. With that said, this is certainly
not one of the quietest drives at maximum performance.
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Not
that many will actually use this, but PlexTools Professional includes both an
audio and multimedia player built-in as well.
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You
have a wide range of other options that honestly can be a bit overwhelming for
the novice user. While I can't possibly show you every single option,
I'll show you a couple of the key menus here. For example, the digital
audio extraction menu will allow you to set your filename format as well as
choose your preferred encoding option. Also, if you plan on over-burning,
you'll have to go in the recording options menu and enable this feature.
Other Included Software
Other
bundled software include Roxio Easy Media Creator Basic, PhotoSuite and Dantz
Retrospect.
We
will, however, be using the latest version the the excellent Nero Burning
Suite for evaluating purposes.
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