What is alcohol 120% program used for?

Alcohol 120%, is a powerful Windows CD and DVD burning software that makes it easy to create backups of DVDs* and CDs. Additionaly, the program lets you store your most used CDs as images on your computer, and you can mount them on 1 of the 31 virtual drives with a click of a button.

http://www.alcohol-soft.com/

It has two main features.
1) Burning CDs/DVDs. This is a pretty standard action that a lot of programs do, and I don’t think needs much explanation.
2) Disk emulation. Alcohol 120% can create an image of a CD/DVD (A virtual copy on your harddrive). You can then run the image on a virtual drive, just like you would run that DVD in a DVD player.
Why would you do that? Well, you could lose the disk and wouldn’t have to worry about it. In some cases, Harddrive read-times are faster than those of CDs/DVDs, and you don’t have to deal with the noise, you can distribute those image files across the internet (Note: This is not legal to do, unless you are the creator of the contents that were on the DVDs), and there are some security benefits.

It’s expensive.

I use the freeware 52% version for accessing data on .iso files. It’s pretty darned useful.

The product is described here by others.
It’s overkill. So many other products with similar capability for the home user.

IMGBurn is the best ISO burner, and daemon tools lite if a perfect disc emulator for free, no restrictions.

@XOIIO I prefer MagicISO. To each there own.