Roxio Creator 2010 Pro review

Ever since CD and DVD burning facilities were first included in Windows, companies such as Roxio and Nero have been searching for other ways of convincing us to buy their software. Their answer to this tricky conundrum has been to create suites of media tools, and over the years their offerings have mushroomed into vast, sprawling - and sometimes chaotic - collections of every media utility under the sun.

Roxio Creator 2010 sees no halt to this seemingly never-ending expansion, adding a bevvy of new and sparkly-looking tools to its already huge collection. There's Windows 7 support for a start - that we'd expect to see - but the capture web video tool is more unusual. This allows you to record Flash video hosted on the web - YouTube clips, for instance - and convert those clips to a format usable on your PC or media player.

Also new, and particularly useful to the keen amateur videographer, is the ability to archive and span large AVCHD files across multiple CD or DVD writable discs. It will take some time to burn all those clips of Johnny learning to ride his bike at the park, but at least you'll be able to reclaim some of your valuable hard disk space without sacrificing your original raw clips.

Rounding off the selection of new features is support for Nvidia CUDA and ATI Stream for offloading transcoding duties onto the GPU, along with the ability to schedule and pause video conversion jobs and a tool that automatically applies ID tags to tracks recorded from internet radio.

But that's not all. The Pro version on review here also includes four extra applications, in addition to the pile included under the Creator 2010 umbrella. SoundSoap SE lets you remove noise from audio tracks. SonicFire Pro 5 allows fine control over the matching of music and soundtracks to your video clips, with the SmartSound plugin offering a selection of generic, royalty-free tracks.