Imagine this, you have two CDs and you need to alternately access data or you need to run program from the CD. You have only one CD drive.
Frustrating? Not anymore. DAEMONS Tools comes to the rescue.
Daemon-Tools is a virtual CD emulator or sometime known as CD image mounter.
Sounds techy, what does it do? Well, it does a two things that might be very interesting to you as a user.
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It allows reading a CD without a CD drive
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It allows reading multiple CDs at the same time
Effectively, Daemon Tools emulate (or “pretend to be”) a CD or DVD drive. So you can read the content of a CD/DVD without a drive. The mounted CD image will appears as a drive letter just like a normal CD. Normal file operations can be perform on it just like any CD.
Before you can mount a CD image, first the CD image had to be created. A CD image is, well, an image of a CD. Simply, it is a digital copy of the CD stored on the harddisk. To create it a tool like Nero is needed. There might be an open source Windows-based program for that but I do not know yet. (Let me know if you do)
“Mount” is a term used quite frequently in unix but a Windows user may not know exactly what it means. It roughly means “hooking it up”. So mounting a CD drive means connecting to the drive so that the system can read information from it.
Similarly mounting a CD image means connecting to the image so that information on the image file can be read. If it is a data disk, think of the image as a big zip file and Daemon-Tool as a program that will allow you to access the files in the zip file.
It does not ends here! What more interesting is that multiple images can be mounted at the same time.
So you see how our original frustrating problem can be solved. Just mount the 2 CD images (or create one image and put the other CD in the drive) and you can access data from both disc at the same time. No CD swapping.
The recent version of DAEMON Tools includes an option to install a client-side software applications (DAEMON Tools Searchbar and Save Now) that behaviorally and contextually targeted ads and comparative shopping results. This what many considered Adware and earned them a red warning from SiteAdvisor.
As noted this is optional and as always exercise some judgement and common sense when using free softwares.
What I like about DAEMON Tools
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mount multiple CD
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support many file formats
Room for improvement
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if only it could create the CD image as well
Chinese support
Simplified Chinese translation can be found on the DAEMON Tools Translations for V4-Series page which also has translation for many other languages.
You will download a single file name 2052.dll. Copy this file to the Lang folder where Daemon Tools is installed, typically C:\Program Files\DAEMON Tools
After restarting, language can be changed on-the-fly by right-clicking on the tray icon and select Options > Language > Chinese
Where to get it?
- DAEMON Tools is at http://www.daemon-tools.cc
- Current version: 4.0.3
- Function: Virtual CD/DVD-rom emulator, CD image mounter
Popularity: 87%
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