OK, I'm back to my theme of CD and DVD creation and management tools that I delayed for a week while I discussed some cool new hardware.

First, a couple of corrections: Last week I wrote that the Saitek Obsidian Wireless mouse cradle charges the mouse. Not true -- the mouse is powered only by the rechargeable batteries that come with it. I also failed to mention that the mouse has a total of five buttons -- the two regular left and right buttons I mentioned, as well as one on the right that can be used by some applications and two on the left that work with Internet Explorer to go forward and backward.

Now that I'm in my second week of using the Saitek Obsidian I am a little more reserved in my enthusiasm. It is still one sleek mouse, but its touch-sensitive scroll feature is too sensitive. This means that often, when you don't want scroll-lock to lock, it does. Another issue: I often press the two left-side buttons accidentally, and a lot of swearing is the result. But these issues may disappear when I get more accustomed to it.

Anyway, back to CD and DVD stuff: I'd wondered for some time whether there was a product that could create a virtual CD burner so I could burn virtual CDs from iTunes.

My thinking on this is that, like almost everyone I know, after I buy music from iTunes I often want to listen to it on a device other than an iPod. To do this, I have to burn the tracks to a CD, then rip that CD to MP3 files. While the process does give me a backup copy, it wastes CDs and is always far more time-consuming than I would like.

So after looking around and trying a few products that didn't do what I wanted -- they provided only a virtual drive and weren't actual burner emulators -- I stumbled across an ambitious piece of software engineering named Virtual CD published by H+H Software.

Virtual CD is available as both 32- and 64-bit drivers for Windows XP, Windows XP64 and Windows Vista, and is pretty painless to install. Given that it is a device driver, I didn't mind having to reboot (something I consider a sin when installing any nonsystem-level program).

Virtual CD's main user interface, the Toolbox, gives you access to the suite's huge number of functions. There's also an optional "autohideable" task pane that provides access to all of the functions, and you can create simple scripts that can load, burn and unload virtual and real media.