Explore and Burn: burn files and folders from the right-click context menu

Explore&Burn is a free app that allows you to burn to files to CD/DVD right from the Windows explorer context menu. It can burn disk image files (ISO, IMG) as well as any file type to a wide range of disc types (including Dual Layer DVD’s). Supports single-session and multi-session discs with ISO-9660, Joliet and UDF file systems.

If you, like me, think that there’s something.. um, magical … about right clicking on a file and being able to quickly perform the operations on it then you might want check this program out. Explore and Burn is a simple CD/DVD burning program that is launched from Windows’ right-click context menu. More notes below.

• How to use: select a file or group of files and right click the Explore and Burn context menu. This will launch the program’s wizard-style file burning process.
• Burning images: Explore&Burn can burn .ISO and .IMG files to CD/DVD; it can also optionally associate itself with these file extensions.
• Supported media: CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM discs including Dual Layer discs.
• Bugs on XP: I encountered a problem in XP whereby the program did not burn ISO images to disk and I got a "Cannot Complete the Disc Writing Wizard" message (regular files burned just fine though). Someone posted this issue in the forum; and although the prescribed fix did not work for me, there’s the promise that this will be addressed in future versions.

Wish list: (or how this program can be even better)

• For non disk image files, this program installs two context menu entries which offer exactly the same functionality, making one of them absolutely redundant (see image to the right). It would be nice to be able to keep only one of them.
• Fixing the disk-burning problem with XP mentioned above.

The verdict: for what it tries to achieve (which is quick, on-the-fly file burning from the desktop), Explore&Burn works beautifully (assuming of course that bugs are eventually dealt with). For most users, however, Explore&Burn is no replacement for a full-fledged, full-featured CD/DVD burning program (such as CDBurnerXP), and it does not claim to be.

Many users will like the quick spontaneity of this. Moreover, this program is perfect for non tech-savvy users who just want to burn files quickly (a perfect thing to install for your grandmother for example).

Version Tested: 1.2

Compatibility: Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista and Windows 7, 32bit and 64bit. XP and Server 2000 may require installing the KB932716 update package from Microsoft.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 2.7 megs)