Product Reviews

Roxio's Easy Media Creator Suite 10, which started life long ago as a simple CD burning program, is a set of media management tools to help you catalogue your music, photo and video files, convert them from one format to another, burn them to disc and do lots of other things besides. Previous versions have picked up several Computer Buyer awards, so version 10 had a lot to live up to.

The Launcher is where it all kicks off: from here you can run all the various sub-programs. Functions are organised by task -there's an audio section, a backup section and so on - which means finding what you want is easy, as long as you know what you want to do. Apart from a suitably shiny and Vista-esque new look, the Launcher hasn't changed all that much since the previous release.

A bit on the side

To appeal to Windows Vista users, Roxio has added a couple of nifty gadgets for your sidebar. The Easy Audio Capture gadget lets you record anything you're listening to, such as Internet radio, with a single click. The other new gadget is the Audio and Video Converter. It sits in your sidebar, and you drag any videos or music files that you want convert over to it, then release them onto the gadget. It will convert the files into whatever you've specified to be your default output format.

This could be very handy, but in practice we found the gadget was a bit flaky. In fact, it crashed the first three times we tried to convert a file. If you don't

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have Vista, you can still perform these same tasks, but you'll have to access them from the Launcher instead.

Other new features include the ability to capture and edit HD video, rip CDs simultaneously from more than one disc drive, convert batches of songs from one format to another, and auto-fix photos taken on mobile phones. The ability to edit HD video is really a necessity these days; no media management program would be complete without it, so it's not a standout feature. Batch conversion of songs is handy, but we're not sure who really needs to rip more than one CD at once, and the same goes for auto-fixing cellphone snaps, though it might suit people who habitually upload their every Sainsburys trip to a Flickr blog. The other new feature, video upload to YouTube, also seems a bit of a gimmick, and we had to configure it manually before it would work.

Playing around

The Automix function compiles playlists to suit your mood based on your initial choice of one song. Like many such utilities, we found it hit-and-miss. It took a long time to scan our specified folder (which only contained a couple of hundred tracks) and then told us it couldn't find any music similar to our selection. We were also a bit disappointed that the Disaster Recovery and Instant Restore functions in the built-in backup program are no more than buttons that lead you to upgrade offers.

There are plenty of other functions in Easy Media Creator 10, including tools to help you manage photos, burn DVDs, create DVDs from DivX files, and generally keep track of your media and make it ready to be moved from one device to another. So, all things considered, this is still a good media management program. It's easy to use, and the core disc burning functions work well. If you use a lot of media files and don't currently have a package to organise and manipulate them, this one wouldn't disappoint. But it's only worth the asking price if you'll make heavy use of it, and if you already have version 9 there's no reason to rush out and upgrade.