Alcohol 120% - Adding Virtual Disc Drives to your PC
For any product developers out there, if you’re creating products on DVD or CD, then you really need to invest in Alcohol 120% to make testing your products much easier, and to save on the digital media you waste during the testing process.
Alcohol 120% is an application which allows you to create virtual disc drives on your PC. If you then create disc images of your projects, such as ISO or NRG images, you can then mount them on the virtual drives and play them as if your products had been burnt to proper discs.
The benefits of this are fairly obvious:
- You can easily create test burns half-way through your project to see how it is commencing
- You don’t waste a disc each time you want to make a burn
- Since there are no disc read/writes, the process is much quicker
Elaborating on point 3, you will still need to test burn a proper disc once you believe your project is complete, to see the true user experience. It could be that you are trying to transfer so much data in a short period of time, playback of your product is stuttered and unwatchable. In this case, you will need to go back to the drawing board. These problems will not be shown up when using the virtual system.
I recently produced a couple of screencasts on using Alcohol 120%, and you can find them below:
Download and Install Alcohol 120% to Create Virtual Disc Drives on your PC
Adding Virtual CD and DVD Drives to your PC, using Alcohol 120%