Alcohol 120% 1.9.7.6221

'Alcohol 120%' is a fully featured CD and DVD tool. It enables you to backup, copy, and emulate both CDs and DVDs. Its interface is user friendly, allowing you to get the job done with just a few clicks.

The program creates a virtual drive, which appears in "My computer". You can mount images on this drive. Mounting an image means associating the image file to the virtual drive. You can use Alcohol 120% to open DVD images with the extensions ISO, NRG, MDS, BWT, CCD, CUE, CDI, B5T, MDS, PDI or other formats. This software is very helpful, if you don't have a DVD drive installed on your computer, because it can emulate one.

Gamers use Alcohol 120% a lot, mostly because the virtual drive that it creates is much faster than a normal CD/DVD device. The virtual drive is accessing the information from the files contained in the image and since the image file is on your hard disk, so it's much faster than reading from a CD/DVD device.

This software has other features that can be sometimes useful. It includes a search feature called "Image Finder". I used this feature couple of times, when I couldn't find a certain backup image file. Alcohol 120% also allows you to erase rewritable discs by running the "Erase Wizard".

Pluses: This software package includes an executable file that supports command line parameters. You can use it to automatically mount or dismount images from a batch script. It supports up to 11 virtual drives, although 2 or 3 are almost always enough.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: Alcohol 120% is a professional tool for CD/DVD management. This software is an alternative to Nero Imagedrive.

version reviewed: 1.9.7 (build 6221)