Product Reviews

The average home PC contains a lot of files: office documents, digital photos, music collections, and perhaps home movies, too. Simple disc-burning suites specialise in backing up these files to CD and DVD, but the full versions of Roxio Creator and Ahead Nero encompass much more than this. Both include a vast range of tools to import, organise, edit and enjoy image, audio and video files. The editing applications don't compare well with dedicated applications such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, but on the whole they are fine for casual use. At around £2.50 per application, these suites are excellent value.

It's exactly a year since the last versions of Nero and Creator were released. The big difference this time is that, while Creator 9 costs £45 to upgrade from previous versions, Nero Reloaded is a free update for Nero 7 Premium users. This seems to be a common trend for Nero and it's worth taking into account if you like to keep up to date with software releases.

media frenzy

Both new versions add support for Blu-ray drives for backups and archiving to 25GB single-layer or 50GB dual-layer discs. Drives are currently slow and expensive, but it's good to see that the software is ready and waiting for drives that are worth buying. Nero also supports HD DVD, the rival technology to Blu-ray, although these drives aren't yet available. Neither package will allow you to create high-definition video discs, however, as video-authoring tools remain limited to DVD and Video CD.

Nero now includes a staggering 21 applications and utilities, not including various diagnostics programs. New to this version is Nero Search, a simple toolbar that sits in the Windows Taskbar and links into the Nero Scout file database. When we first encountered Scout it behaved a little erratically, but we're glad to see the bugs have been fixed. It's a neat media organiser that appears in My Computer like a disk drive but arranges files by type, date, artist or album rather than location on your computer. Also new is Nero Sipps, a Voice-over IP (VoIP) program for free phone calls and videoconferencing over a broadband connection. With free services such as Skype and various instant messengers already well established, we're not convinced that the world needs another proprietary VoIP

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service, but it's well featured and reasonably straightforward.

The final new addition is Nero Mobile, a media playback program for Windows CE, Pocket PC and Windows Mobile devices, with a Symbian version in the pipeline. Its inclusion seems to be as much about establishing the Nero Digital format as adding value to the suite, but it's a nice bit of software all the same. Nero Digital uses MPEG4 video and AAC audio to give excellent quality in small file sizes, but only Nero users will be able to play them. Unless Ahead makes its encoding and playback software free, you're better off storing video files in more widely compatible formats such asWindows Media.

There's a smattering of new features across the existing modules in the Nero suite, including unlimited MP3 encoding, backing up of entire hard disks and the ability to record and time-shift TV programmes in Nero Home, Ahead's Windows Media Center-inspired playback software. As with Nero Scout, Nero Home showed promise but suffered teething problems when we last reviewed it. It's much better behaved now, but it's still slow to react to mouse clicks at times.

Roxio Creator 9's only brand new module is Digital Media Experience, another Windows Media Center clone. It's a little light on features and has a tendency to squash photos during slideshows so everyone looks a bit plump, but otherwise it's pleasant enough.

VideoWave, the video-editing application, has had an injection of power and now offers 32 tracks for complex multi-layered video montages. However, the convoluted arrangement of nested folders confuses things. There are tracks dedicated to text, overlay or effects that can't be re-ordered once they are created. The new noise-reduction and automatic colour-correction tools are straightforward, though. The DVD-authoring program MyDVD has some new options for advanced menu navigation, but as with VideoWave's new tracks it's tricky to get the best out of them.

Roxio Creator's greatest strength is the tight integration of its various modules and friendly task-based approach. New tasks include tidying up the tags in MP3 collections, converting video files for iPod, PSP or mobile phone and recording whatever audio is being played on your PC, ideal for capturing radio shows or producing podcasts. There's also a ringtone-maker task, but it doesn't support any UK phone networks or USB transfers.

suite truth

Choosing between Creator and Nero is like choosing between a PC or Mac. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately they're not that different. If you've been using one of these suites for a while, we'd recommend you stick with that brand. If you're using Roxio Creator 8 Suite, it's not worth upgrading. But if you're moving up from a simple OEM package, Roxio's superior ease of use and slightly more capable media-editing tools give it the edge.