WinISO 6.3 – a toolkit that enables you to create, edit and burn .iso disc images

If you’ve downloaded the public preview of Windows 8.1 or any Linux distro, you will be familiar with the .iso file format. It’s basically an image of a CD or DVD, and instead of supplying a physical disc. Software companies now simply provide an .iso download from their website and you can burn it yourself. It’s not just operating systems that are provided as .iso image; recovery software, backup software, anti-virus, clean-up kits and more are all provided as disc images.

WinISO is a utility that is packed with functions for creating and managing the .iso files in your collection, and it aims to do just about everything you can think of related to disc images. Version 5 is free, but that is an old program that supports only Windows XP. Version 6 works on every version of Windows up to 8 and it adds a few new features too.

The simplicity of the interface is nice, and there’s a menu bar across the top of the window and a toolbar with colorful icons for accessing the most common functions. Some of the toolbar icons have drop-down menus too. Disc images cannot normally be opened in Windows, which prevents you from accessing their contents, but WinISO opens them up in an Explorer-type view to show the files and folders they contain. This enables you to view the files in the disc image, open documents or programs to copy them to the desktop and to the PC’s disk drive. Disc images can be mounted, which makes them appear to be a standard disk drive in Windows. An extra drive letter appears in Explorer and you can open any of files.

WinISO cannot only opens .iso files, but also .cue, .bin, .nrg, .mds, .mdf, .ccd, .dvd, .img too. There may be other disc image formats, but this list covert all the common ones you’re likely to encounter. One of the tasks you might want to perform is to convert one format to another, perhaps to enable your CD/DVD-writing software to burn a disc image, and using the Save As command, you can choose whatever file format you want. Not that you need a CD/DVD burner, because WinISO has one built-in, and you can load any of the formats supported and burn them to CD, DVD or even Blu-ray discs.

You can make your own blank .iso image with a single click. Then you just drag files and folders from an Explorer window and drop them on the image. The file system can be ISO 9660, UDF or HFS Plus, and you can save the disc image in any of the supported formats. You can burn it to CD, DVD or Blu-ray, mount it and so on. CDs and DVDs can be converted to disc images and stored on the PC’s disk drive, which is useful for backing up software and other discs in case they’re lost or damaged.

There are few differences between each decimal point release, but they mount up and version 6.3 is only slightly better than 6.2 but is much better than 6.0. When you consider the low price of this software, it’s an essential buy for anyone wanting to create, edit and burn disc images.

It’s a great utility tool for anyone working with disc images.