DAEMON Tools is a virtual drive and optical disc authoring program for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and Mac OS.

Overview

DAEMON tools was originally a successor of ''Generic SafeDisc emulator'' and incorporated all of its features. The program claims to be able to defeat most

copy protection Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, is any measure to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media. Copy protection is most commonly found on vid ...

schemes such as SafeDisc and SecuROM. It is currently compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. DAEMON Tools has a special mode for proper operation of copies of discs with advanced protection ( SafeDisc, SecuRom and LaserLock, CDCOPS, StarForce and Protect CD), which are used on some discs with games.

Editions

Six editions of the product exist: Ultra, Lite, Pro Standard, Pro Advanced, Net and DT for Mac. A feature comparison is given below. Also, the company provides two additional solutions for the data storage organization: DAEMON Tools USB 2 that allows sharing different types of USB devices between remote workstations and DAEMON Tools iSCSI Target 2 – a cross-platform solution that enables creating an iSCSI storage server and provides access to virtual or physical devices, along with VHD images, within home or corporate network. ;Notes: :A. Free for non-commercial use without technical support. Technical support and the right to use commercially may be purchased. :B. In

Korea Korea is a peninsular region in East Asia consisting of the Korean Peninsula, Jeju Island, and smaller islands. Since the end of World War II in 1945, it has been politically Division of Korea, divided at or near the 38th parallel north, 3 ...

, Freemium license is not available since ver. 4.45.1. :C. Applies on to .mds and .mdx images. :D. Supported output formats include .iso, .mds/.mdf and .mdx :E. The ability to split an image files into multiple files of fxed maximum sizes. Not supported by DAEMON Tools Lite, as of 22 February 2012. :F. The ability to mount an image into a folder on an

NTFS NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s. It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Tabl ...

drive

File format

The default file format of DAEMON Tools is Media Data eXtended (MDX). MDX is a disc image file format similar to MDS/MDF images. It supports all of MDS/MDF format features except that all data is in one monolithic file only. The files of these types bear the filename extension of . MDX file contains

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

of original media – specifically the main physical parameters of disc, such as layer breaks, sessions, tracks and other. It could be described as being an archive file containing all data from a CD/DVD. It also supports

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressi ...

. MDX file includes the magic number "MEDIA DESCRIPTOR" at the beginning of the file.

Controversy

On 13 February 2012, one of DAEMON Tools' components known as MountSpace became a subject of privacy concerns. MountSpace, a service-oriented component gathers and sends information about disc images used in DAEMON Tools to mountspace.com along with users'

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...

es. Although MountSpace can be disabled during installation, it is criticized for transmitting information despite being disabled and lacking a privacy policy. The initial discovery of the concerning issue is attributed to Rafael Rivera of ''Within Windows'' blog.

Related programs

Y.A.S.U.

YASU ''(Yet Another SecuROM Utility)'' is a very small tool that works as a ''SCSI-drive protector''. It was created by sYk0 and can be used to hide emulated drives from SecuROM 7 and SafeDisc 4. YASU is a companion program for Daemon Tools and currently being hosted, supported and maintained by the Daemon Tools team. On March 4 of 2009, sYk0 announced development of Omen which is to succeed development of YASU. As of January 2010, development of Omen has been abandoned.

References

External links

* {{Disk image emulators software Disk image emulators Utilities for macOS Windows CD/DVD writing software Utilities for Windows