One of free software's premier applications, KDE's CD and DVD burning suite K3b, is about to hit the big 1-0. The new release represents a level of feature-completeness and stability that surpasses all previous K3b releases and, perhaps, all free software competitors.
..............
Trueg refers to K3b 1.0's reworked interface as "media-centric." In past K3b releases, users were presented with a "device-centric" interface, where tasks were executed in terms of devices such as CD-RW or DVD-R drives. For instance, to copy an audio CD, a user might have had to specify a source device as obscure as "NEC DVD_RW ND-3540A" (the optical drive with the source CD) and something equally cryptic as the output device. With the new interface, K3b attempts to present these options to users in a more understandable fashion, so that the source medium is "Audio CD" and the burn medium is "Empty CD-R medium." The media-centric interface is a benefit of K3b's new MediaCache, a feature which keeps track of the media in each optical drive.
