Product Reviews

Roxio's Easy Media Creator has a lengthy and chequered history. Long ago, in a different millennium, it was Adaptec's Easy CD Creator. But like most CD-burning apps, it's since bloated almost beyond recognition. This Supersonic version includes no less than 18 bundled apps, covering image and video editing, DVD authoring, data backup, still-image slide-show capabilities, and a DVD player. Naturally, there's CD- and DVD-burning in there somewhere as well.

As with previous versions of Easy Media Creator 7, all these different apps are managed from a vast front end organised by Music, Data, Photo, Video and DVD categories. Underneath, you can access the same apps directly rather than via tasks, and underneath that are your recent projects. It isn't as attractive to look at as the Ulead DVD MovieFactory 4 front end, but the Roxio approach is certainly easy to use.

Music functions include CD ripping, with both Coding Technologies' and Fraunhofer's MP3 codecs, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and WMA to choose from. There's an LP and Tape Assistant to help you record from analog media; this lets you bring in one side of an LP as one big file, then split it up into tracks, enhance it, and export it in any of the formats above. You can also record live audio, or burn audio and MP3 CDs.

The data section comprises disc copying (which uses a separate applet) and burning files to disc. Creating a backup project calls up Backup MyPC Deluxe (also available as a standalone product), a fully fledged data backup software capable of full, incremental and differential backups. It can also help you create a full recovery set to help bring your PC back to life in the event of a disaster.

The image section of Creator lets you capture stills from a wide variety of peripherals attached to your system. This includes any video-capture devices, as well as removable media and, confusingly, audio devices. Image-editing capabilities are provided by PhotoSuite 7, one of the apps acquired in the purchase of MGI by Roxio a few years back. This offers a task-based approach to enhancing your digital photos. It isn't Photoshop - or Paint Shop Pro for that matter - but it's quick and easy to use, and there's a lot more power available than there appears to be

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at first glance.

Clicking on the Create Slideshow option will cause a bit of a shock, as the Sonic-branded MyDVD Slideshow appears - that's because Sonic bought Roxio at the end of 2004. Sonic MyDVD Slideshow lets you create image sequences on DVD and VCD. As it uses the OpenDVD format for DVDs, slide shows created on this disc format can be re-edited at a later stage. However, it isn't quite as easy to use as the slide-show features within Ulead's Media Studio 4.

There's also the option to create a greetings card, although that's just another view within PhotoSuite, offering collage, montage and graphical borders.

Most of the video-editing capabilities come from VideoWave 7 Professional, which has improved greatly since its MGI days. The interface is no longer over-designed, and it even supports an overlay track with keying or picture-in-picture. However, only one filter can be applied at a time, and not to any overlaid tracks at all, which is a rather strange and annoying limitation. It can output to a wide variety of formats, including video files, back to DV tape, or the Internet, although all the settings are hidden behind wizards. For the truly lazy, there are automated video-editing options in the form of the fully automatic CineMagic or the partially assisted StoryBuilder.

DVD and VideoCD authoring is supplied by Roxio's DVD Builder. This has limited video-editing capabilities built-in as well. You can edit the video represented by each title icon on the menu, adding extra clips with transitions in between. There's an automatic chapter-detection function, although we found it was a little overzealous, finding chapter points for even fairly minor camera moves.

The menu design starts with the usual predefined themes for main and chapter menus, which can then be customised. You can also move buttons around the menu and resize them, and import your own photo or video backgrounds.

New to the DVD section is the DivX-to-DVD utility. This will convert your DivX files to DVD-compliant MPEG2 VOB files, and either burn them to DVD or leave them on your hard disk to burn manually. The potential copyright issues aside, it does its job well, converting DivX to MPEG2 at near real-time on a 3GHz system.

So, there's a huge amount packed in - we haven't even mentioned the capable Label Creator, the CinePlayer DVD playback software, the Media Manager, or the Image loader, which allows you to mount disc images stored on hard disk as virtual optical drives. Some of the individual apps, such as the video editor, aren't quite on a par with the standalone competition, and it would be easy to criticise Roxio for throwing far too much into one product - if it weren't for the price. Even at £60, just a few of the apps make the bundle good value, and the street price is likely to be less.