A free, modern, open-source CD/DVD burner for Windows 11. Both a command-line tool and a GUI. MIT licensed. Free forever. No spyware, no installers, no bundled VPNs, no "free trial" nag screens, no telemetry, no accounts.
The current state of CD/DVD burning software in 2026 is grim. The "free" tools mostly come bundled with junkware — sneaky toolbar installers, "registry cleaners," VPN trial offers, telemetry. The "premium" ones charge subscription fees for software that hasn't meaningfully changed since 2008. This shouldn't be a market. Optical disc burning is a solved engineering problem. The Windows APIs and SCSI MMC commands needed are documented and stable. So here's the deal: futureburn is MIT-licensed, the code lives on GitHub, anyone can build it, fork it, ship it, audit it. If anyone tries to sell you this software, they're scamming you. Walk away.
A passion project that grew teeth.
Audio CDs
- Burn Red Book audio CDs — single- or multi-track, verified playable in real players.
- Input from WAV, MP3, M4A, AAC, WMA, FLAC, and M3U / M3U8 playlists.
- Three burn engines — IMAPI v2, IMAPI v1, raw SPTI/SCSI — so you can use whatever your drive likes.
Data & ISO discs
- Burn ISO images to CD-R / DVD±R / DVD±RW.
- Build an ISO 9660 + Joliet + UDF image from any folder, then burn it — in one step or two.
- Burn BIN/CUE data discs.
Video discs
- Author hardware-playable DVD-Video from any video file — point it at an MKV and it carries chapters, every audio track, and subtitles through to a burned disc.
- DVD menus — root menu with Play / Scene Selection, plus a per-chapter scene menu.
- DVD-Audio authoring, and experimental Video CD authoring.
Disc labels
- LightScribe label burning — etch artwork onto the top side of the disc.
- One-shot labeled audio CD — burn the music and the label with a single command.
Inspection & repair
- Full drive + disc inspection — capabilities, media type, finalization status, complete TOC.
- MusicBrainz disc lookup, with a fuzzy TOC fallback for home-burned and older discs.
- Disc-folder validator — recognises DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, VCD, SVCD, Blu-ray, or plain data.
- Salvage partially-burned discs (
finalize).
Two ways to drive it
- A full command-line tool, and a four-tile WPF GUI (every tile is wired and working).
See docs/ for how each of these works under the hood.
- CD-Text and true gapless DAO — the encoder is complete and correct, but writing either one needs a drive that supports SAO cue-sheet recording. The test-bench LG GE20LU10 doesn't, so the burn path is built but awaits SAO-capable hardware. (
cuesheet-probe <drive>tells you whether yours qualifies.) - Headless LightScribe submission — works today via the LSS one-click dialog; fully programmatic submission is blocked on undocumented LSS internals.
- Blu-ray burning — when the test hardware arrives.
- Mac/Linux ports — long after Windows is rock solid.
The four-tile main window — pick what you want to do:
Burn Audio CD — drag in tracks, pick a drive, hit Burn. Background-thread burn with live progress and post-burn verification:
Burn Blu-ray / DVD — hand it a ready ISO or a folder, or hit Choose video and feed it an MKV / MP4 — it transcodes that into a real DVD-Video, chapters, audio tracks and subtitles and all, then burns a disc that plays in a DVD player:
CD Info — every optical drive and the disc in it: capabilities, what's loaded, a one-line suggested action (blank → ready to burn, finalized → ready to rip, ...), finalization status, and the complete TOC with per-track type and duration:
Burn Label (LightScribe) — drag in a picture, pick a LightScribe drive and a quality, hit Burn — the drive etches the artwork into the disc's top coating:
A non-trivial chunk of the working internet still has CD/DVD drives plugged in and is producing physical media — for cars without aux jacks, for archival, for art objects, for the principle. The software market that serves these people is hostile by default. CD-burning shareware in 2026 is what shareware was in 2002, except the bundled spyware is more sophisticated.
futureburn is an alternative: open-source, no-strings, no-account-required, no-network-calls. The repo, the code, the binaries — all free. If you want to inspect every SCSI command we send to your drive, the code is right there. If you want to fork it and add a feature, please do. If you want to make money helping people burn discs, sell support contracts or USB writers, not the software.
CD writing on Windows has three layers, and not all of them work on every drive. futureburn supports all three so we can pick whatever the hardware likes:
| Flag | Layer | Use when |
|---|---|---|
--engine v2 (default) |
IMAPI 2 (the modern Windows COM API, MsftDiscFormat2TrackAtOnce) |
Most modern drives. Just works. |
--engine v1 |
IMAPI 1 (legacy XP-era COM, MsDiscMasterObj + IRedbookDiscMaster) |
When v2 returns "mode page not present" or fails for unclear reasons on an old drive. |
--engine spti |
Raw SCSI Pass-Through (IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH_DIRECT + MMC opcodes) |
When both IMAPI versions are uncooperative. Same approach as ImgBurn. This is the engine that successfully wrote our first real audio CD. |
Run the diagnostics to find out which one your drive likes:
futureburn drives -v # full capability dump for every drive
futureburn cd-info F # finalization status + TOC for the disc in F:
futureburn imapi-v1-info # is IMAPI v1 functional on this PC?
futureburn spti-info F # does raw SCSI pass-through work on F:?- Language: C# (.NET 8), GUI: WPF
- Audio: NAudio (MIT) for decoding + resampling
- Burning: IMAPI v2 + v1 via hand-rolled
[ComImport]interfaces (no NuGet wrappers); SPTI via direct P/Invoke and SCSI MMC opcodes - External tools (optional, for video discs):
ffmpeg,dvdauthor,spumux,dvda-author - Target OS: Windows 11 (Win10 likely works, not a goal)
- Third-party NuGet packages: NAudio. That's it. No installer, no telemetry SDK, no analytics package.
# Drives + capabilities
dotnet run --project src/Futureburn.Cli -- drives -v
# Disc inspection
dotnet run --project src/Futureburn.Cli -- cd-info F
# Burn an audio CD
dotnet run --project src/Futureburn.Cli -- burn mix.m3u8 F: --engine spti --speed 16x
# Burn an ISO, or build+burn an ISO from a folder
dotnet run --project src/Futureburn.Cli -- burn-iso ubuntu.iso F: --yes
dotnet run --project src/Futureburn.Cli -- burn-folder "C:\my-files" F: --label MYDISC
# Author a DVD-Video from an MKV and burn it in one go
dotnet run --project src/Futureburn.Cli -- dvdv-author movie.mkv .\out --menu --burn F:
# LightScribe a label
dotnet run --project src/Futureburn.Cli -- lightscribe-print F .\cover.png
# GUI
dotnet run --project src/Futureburn.GuiRun futureburn with no arguments for the full command list. The GUI opens to a four-tile main window — Burn Audio CD, Burn Blu-ray / DVD, CD Info, and Burn Label (LightScribe) — all four are live.
futureburn/
├── Futureburn.sln
├── Directory.Build.props # one place to bump version, set framework, etc.
├── CHANGELOG.md
├── docs/ # how-it-works documentation
├── LICENSE # MIT
└── src/
├── Futureburn.Core/
│ ├── Imapi/ # IMAPI v2 + v1 typed COM, drive enum, disc inspection
│ ├── Spti/ # SCSI pass-through: interop, MMC opcodes, burn engines, CD-Text
│ ├── Audio/ # NAudio wrappers, M3U parser, CD format constants
│ ├── Fs/ # ISO 9660 / Joliet / UDF image building, disc-folder validator
│ ├── Image/ # BIN/CUE parsing and image streams
│ ├── Authoring/ # DVD-Video / DVD-Audio / VCD authoring, IFOs, menus
│ ├── Ffmpeg/ # ffmpeg / ffprobe detection and invocation
│ ├── Tools/ # external-tool locators + runners (dvdauthor, spumux, ...)
│ ├── LightScribe/ # LSPrintAPI interop, label-image conversion
│ └── Net/ # MusicBrainz client
├── Futureburn.Cli/ # all the commands
└── Futureburn.Gui/ # WPF — main window + four feature windows
One number, one place — <Version> in Directory.Build.props. Every project picks it up. The CLI prints its version on every invocation; the GUI shows it in the title bar and About dialog.
Per-version changelog entries live in CHANGELOG.md.
Pull requests welcome. Issues welcome. If you have a quirky drive that doesn't work, open an issue with the output of futureburn drives -v and futureburn imapi-v1-info and we'll add a workaround.
If you build a feature, please match the existing tone in code comments — explanatory where the why isn't obvious (especially for SCSI/COM/IMAPI quirks) and otherwise let the names speak.
MIT. Free for everyone, forever. Use it, fork it, ship it, sell hardware bundled with it. Just don't sell the software itself and pretend it's not free — there are too many people doing that already.
No warranty. No promises. Burns at your own risk.