With Easy Media Creator 7, Roxio hasn't just strapped a few of its flagship applications together; it's built a new Swiss Army Knife suite for digital media and disc burning. Easy Media Creator, which will be available from late March, expands upon Easy CD & DVD Creator , keeping the suite tightly integrated but making it a much broader set of media-editing tools for photos, video, data and audio. Pinnacle and Sonic have bulked up their editing and authoring offerings, and Ahead Software's and NTI's burning applications offer more depth, but none currently matches Easy Media Creator's expansive scope -- not even Apple's iLife. If you're looking for a suite of software that can handle almost any kind of CD or DVD project -- capturing and ripping, editing and authoring, saving and sharing, or burning and playing -- look no further than Roxio's Easy Media Creator 7.
Easy Media Creator 7 comes on two CDs -- one with all of the applications and another packed with audio and video clips, textures and graphics. Conflicts between different disc-burning tools have been an ongoing problem with Windows systems, so Roxio recommends that you first uninstall other packet-writing or drive-emulation software on your system; the software will automatically detect previous versions of Easy CD Creator and offer to remove them, too. After we typed in our CD key, the installation chugged away for about 15 minutes -- reasonable, considering the amount of software.
Roxio has brought a common look and feel to Easy Media Creator's various components. There are large buttons and pop-up tool tips for beginners, although advanced users can opt for more options and controls. Because of Easy Media Creator's sheer number of tools, Roxio has devised an excellent new user interface. Expanding on a more traditional launcher setup, in which you select which specific application to open, Easy Media Creator also features a user-friendly, task-oriented interface. Split into three tiers, the home page's top row offers a list of possible jobs, divided by category: Music, Data (CD), Photo, Video, and DVD. The middle row provides a more traditional list of the available applications and tools, while the bottom row displays a list of recent projects for quick access.
Although Easy Media Creator's components are highly integrated, they're still separate applications. When you select a task, the home menu immediately disappears, and you're left with a blank screen until an application loads; it's a bit disconcerting at first. The suite's Media Manager is great for previewing and organising all of your files, but it's not always the most efficient way to execute tasks such as editing a group of photos or videos. Thankfully, each editing application still includes its own integrated browser or preview interface.
Easy Media Creator 7 brims with features new and old. Roxio has taken a major step in dividing up capture and management components for all types of media -- photo, video, and audio. But it also makes it easy to bring all of the media types back together to create complete productions, such as slide shows and DVDs.
Creator Classic, Roxio's trusty application for burning data and audio CDs and MP3 discs, can now perform scheduled backups for periodic, automated data archiving. Roxio's Retrieve utility can be included on backup discs to extract files with optional encryption or multi-disc spanning. A Drag-to-Disc feature lets you write discs directly from Windows Explorer, while the handy Disc And Device utility provides information on disc drives and their contents.
For audio work, Creator can now rip to the Ogg Vorbis format, and it uses the Gracenote CDDB2 service to identify audio CDs. Another utility lets you create disc labels, jewel case inserts and booklets. Beyond simple disc-to-disc copying, the Disc Copier utility also lets you extract material from unprotected DVD-Video discs. You can preview video content, select an individual video title, and choose to copy just the primary audio format; however, you cannot pick and choose video titles and audio tracks. The Disc Copier is OK, but limited compared to some standalone tools such as InterVideo's DVD Copy.
The Capture tool can import photos from a camera or scanner, grab video from a camcorder or a TV tuner, or capture audio; the SmartScan feature lets you prescan a DV tape to preview scenes before capturing, saving time in the long run. You can also use Capture to extract video clips from a DVD disc or DVD folder on a hard disk, but with less control than you have using Disc Copier. During our testing, the DVD disc-scanning feature often failed to find clips.
PhotoSuite 7 provides a very friendly interface for common photo-editing tasks, as well as enhancement options such as painting, masking and facial-flaw correction; it's a nice application for beginners but has less depth than other dedicated photo editors. For video editing, VideoWave 7 offers a host of options for users of various skill levels; you can use CineMagic to automatically edit a video production, StoryBuilder to guide you through the process more manually or the Production Editor interface to create a production using a storyboard or time-line view. We really like VideoWave's multiple modes, and it should keep new users happy for quite a while.
Easy Media Creator includes DVD Builder for authoring DVDs and a variety of VCD formats. It offers template-based DVD menu design, with control over designing menus, buttons, chapters and tracks of multiple clips (with transitions). The Plug & Burn feature records directly from a DV camcorder to a DVD disc, and the Edit DVD disc feature can edit directly on a rewritable disc or add new titles to a recordable disc before it is finalised.
Easy Media Creator has loads of other features, including a basic sound editor, a simple media player that cannot display movies in full wide-screen and Napster 2.0 for (legally) previewing and purchasing downloaded music (Napster's revamped service is not yet launched in Australia).
Roxio offers good support for Easy Media Creator 7. Extensive built-in help comes by way of links to the PDF user guides and additional online resources. The company's Web site offers a searchable knowledge base and discussion groups with active responses from Roxio staff. Roxio provides complimentary email technical support, but for only 90 days after a user's first contact. Telephone support costs US$35 per incident. Support requires a Technical Support Identification number, found on the installation CD (but different from the CD Key).
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