CD Archiver

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on June 29, 2012

CD Archiver is a free program for cataloging your disk collection. Data and music CDs and DVDs, rewritable disks...if it fits in your tray and runs in Windows, CD Archiver can probably handle its files, and system folders, too. It supports more than a dozen archive file formats, including ZIP, 7z, RAR, and TAR; more than two dozen audio formats ranging from APE to WMA; and dozens and dozens of video, image, and other formats. CD Archiver packs some interesting features, such as links for images containing GPS data. It also finds information about disks online from sources such as Amazon, IMDb, and FreeDB. It requires .NET Framework 4.

CD Archiver can import existing database files, and the program's installer gave us the option to start with a new database or open an existing one. Since we didn't yet have a database, we started by creating a new one. CD Archiver has a clean, up-to-date Aero-style interface, with many optional themes available as well as language, font, and other choices. The interface showed a tree view of our database in the left and disk contents in the main view.

We stuck a DVD in the CD tray and clicked File > Add > Disc in CD Archiver's menu bar. The program asked us to load a disk in our optical drive but then recognized our disk. We created a Category for it in a wizard, and the program also let us create Tags to organize data. CD Archiver quickly scanned and archived our disk, popping open our tray when the task was done. A pop-up advised us that we could speed up the loading process by disabling our antivirus software, but we weren't in such a hurry. Next we tried a CD-ROM, a hardware installation and setup disk. CD-Archiver quickly cataloged its 1,231 entries and displayed them neatly in folders in the tree view. We could also add offline disks or browse to a system folder to add. We could rename or edit any entry; save, loan, import, and export data; create Metadata tags; and make detailed searches for data. We just scratched the surface of this versatile database, though.