AnyBurn 6.9

Burning a disc should not require a 200 MB suite with a trial counter and three toolbars.

AnyBurn is the opposite of that.

It is a roughly 5 MB download that burns CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs, builds and edits disc images, rips audio CDs, and writes bootable USB drives, and the free edition is free for business use as well as home use.

Free or Pro: What Paying Actually Buys

AnyBurn comes in two editions, and the split is unusually generous. Almost everything sits in the free one.

Burning, disc copying, image creation and editing, audio CD ripping, MP3 CD burning, disc surface testing and bootable USB creation are all in AnyBurn Free, with no nag screen and no trial clock.

AnyBurn Pro adds exactly two things: converting audio files between formats, and installing Windows directly to a USB drive so it boots and runs from the stick.

If neither of those is what brought you here, the free edition is the whole product. And if audio conversion is the missing piece, LameXP does that job free and does it better.

What It Burns, Rips and Builds

On the burning side it writes data discs to CD, DVD and Blu-ray, appends to a disc you have already used, and can burn on the fly without staging a temporary image first.

On the image side it opens and converts a long list of formats - ISO, BIN and CUE, plus MDF, MDS, NRG, UIF, ISZ, DAA and DMG - and recent versions added compressed images (zst, lz, br) and virtual disk files from QEMU and Parallels.

You can also copy a disc sector by sector to another disc or to an image file, erase rewritable discs with a quick or full wipe, test the disc surface for unreadable sectors, and read out the details of any drive or disc you have plugged in.

Browsing and editing an existing ISO without rebuilding it is the quiet feature people end up using most, and ISO Workshop is the closest free alternative if you want a second opinion on that specific job.

The Audio CD Detail Worth Getting Right

AnyBurn builds Audio CDs from MP3, M4A, FLAC, OGG, APE, WMA and WAV files, decoding them into the standard CD audio format as it burns.

That is a real distinction and it trips people up. An Audio CD plays in any CD player, whereas an MP3 CD, which AnyBurn also makes, is a data disc full of MP3 files and only plays in hardware that specifically supports it.

Ripping goes the other way, pulling tracks off a CD to MP3, FLAC, OGG, APE, WMA or WAV.

One limit worth knowing before you rip a collection: AnyBurn's MP3 encoder is built in, and there is no way to point it at your own copy of LAME. For archival ripping, Exact Audio Copy with an external encoder is still the accuracy benchmark, and the CD ripping guide covers the settings that matter.

If you rip to FLAC and tidy up afterwards, Mp3tag handles the tagging and foobar2000 the playback and conversion.

Bootable USB Drives

Optical drives have quietly disappeared from most machines, and AnyBurn has followed the traffic. This half of the program is newer than the burning half and gets most of the development attention now.

It writes a bootable USB drive from an ISO, and since version 6.8 it can do the same from a zip, rar or 7z archive without unpacking it first.

It also reads a USB drive back into an image file and writes that image to another stick, which is a tidy way to clone a working recovery drive.

For Windows installers it can customise the setup, the options that let you skip parts of the out-of-box experience. Installing Windows so it runs from the USB drive is the Pro-only feature.

If bootable media is the only reason you are here, two purpose-built tools do it with less clicking: Rufus for a single ISO, and Ventoy if you want one stick holding a dozen ISOs you can pick from at boot. balenaEtcher is the friendlier option for .img files and SD cards.

Which Build to Download

• Standard installer - one file covering 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, around 5 MB.
• ARM64 build - a native version for Snapdragon and other ARM Windows machines, which very few burning tools bother to ship.
• Portable edition - a zip you extract and run, ideal on a technician's USB stick or a locked-down PC where you cannot install anything.

It runs on everything from Windows 11 back to Windows XP, which matters if you are keeping an old machine alive purely because it still has a working optical drive.

Pick your build here and the install takes a few seconds.

Where AnyBurn Stops

It burns and images discs. It does not rip protected commercial video discs, and it will not author a DVD menu from your holiday footage.

For pulling a Blu-ray or DVD into a file, MakeMKV is the tool, with HandBrake afterwards if you want the result smaller.

And if you only need to open an ISO rather than burn it, mounting it is faster - Virtual CloneDrive and ImgDrive both add a virtual drive to Windows in a couple of clicks.

How It Compares to the Other Free Burners

ImgBurn is the veteran and still the most downloaded burner in the Burning Tools category, with deeper control over write strategies. Its installer has historically carried bundled offers, so watch the checkboxes.

BurnAware Free is the closest match in spirit, clean and simple, though its free edition holds back more features than AnyBurn's does.

CDBurnerXP still works but is no longer developed, and True Burner and InfraRecorder are worth a look if you want something even more stripped back.

Against the paid tools, PowerISO and UltraISO cover similar ground with a licence attached and a file-size limit until you pay for one.

Changes in AnyBurn 6.9

- Some minor bug fixes and enhancements.

A quiet release, which is normal here. The bigger recent additions were bootable USB drives built from zip, rar and 7z archives in 6.8, extra Windows install customisation options in 6.7 and 6.6, and support for zst, lz and br compressed images along with USB drive imaging in 6.5.