Glorylogic releases ISO Workshop

If you want to back up a CD, DVD or Blu-ray disc, then the ISO file offers the opportunity to take advantage of all that spare capacity on your backup drive, using that as a storage medium for your backed up discs. ISO files are exact images of discs, which also comes in handy when you, or someone else, wants to distribute a CD without incurring the costs of burning a disc and posting it.

Windows 7 has some limited support for ISO files built-in: you can create an ISO file from a disc, or burn a disc from an ISO file using tools built into the OS, but what if you're using an earlier version of Windows, or you've been handed a disc image in a format other than ISO? The quick, simple and completely free answer is ISO Workshop, a new release from Glorylogic.

ISO Workshop is a simple, lightweight tool that allows you to work with ISO files in four different ways. Like Windows 7, you can convert physical discs into ISO or CUE image formats, plus burn discs (CD, DVD and Blu-ray) from a selected ISO image file. But the program also allows you to extract individual files and folders from various disc-based images, including ISO, DMG (popular on Macs) and BIN. You can also convert files to ISO (and BIN) format from other disc-based formats too.

It's all very simple to use: the four options are presented on the program's home screen, and clicking one takes you to a simple screen where you typically select your source and target files, tick the box to verify the file or disc after it has been created, converted or burned, and that's it. The only major thing the program can't do is mount ISO image files as if they were actual physical discs, but there are plenty of freebies out there you can use alongside ISO Workshop, including the excellent Virtual CloneDrive.

ISO Workshop 1.0 is freeware, and works on Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista and 7 (both 32- and 64-bit versions).