Finding the right disc burning tool for you can sometimes be a problem. The big commercial suites are expensive, but smaller freebies are often buggy, unreliable, sometimes weighed down with adware. So it’s good to find a small but capable alternative in Free Any Burn.

The program arrives as a compact download, only around 1MB. You can just unzip and run it right away, no installation required, no adware hassles. And it’s extremely portable: the authors claim it can run on anything from Window 98 upwards, so this really is a program you can run just about anywhere.

The Free Any Burn interface isn’t exactly visually impressive, with no toolbars, no fancy graphics or colourful tiles: just ten grey buttons leading to the program’s various functions. But this doesn’t mean it’s lacking in functionality, and in fact Free Any Burn handles most key tasks very well.

Attractive? No. But the rather basic interface is very easy to use.

The program can of course create data discs (CD, DVD or Blu-ray), run copies or erase rewritable discs. But it can also rip or create audio CDs from MP3, WMA, WAV, APE and FLAC files. And there’s plenty of disc image-related functions, with the program able to create ISO or BIN/CUE images from discs, or files and folders; it can burn many more image formats to disc (ISO, BIN, ASHDISC, IMG, CDI, NRG, VCD, more); and it can even convert more obscure image formats to ISO for easier use.

Each of these options works just as you’d expect. Choose to create an audio CD or burn a data disc, say, and you can drag and drop the files you need, rearrange them as required, choose a few simple options (burning speed, whether you want to verify your data or finalize the disc) before creating your disc with a click.

What you won’t find here is any video-related functionality, no real surprise considering the complexity involved. We noticed that some quite basic functionality (multi-session support) was only added in the last few days. The program is only updated occasionally, too – just twice so far in 2013 – so even if you find and report a bug, it may not be fixed in a hurry.

For all that, Free Any Burn is free, portable, and worked very well in our tests, so if you just need the burning basics then it’s worth a try.