Product Reviews

Roxio's Easy Media Creator suite has finally reached its 12th version, and to celebrate its new look Roxio have given it a new, snappier title.

The new version follows closely in its predecessors' footsteps, but the first impression - after a rather lengthy half-hour install - is one of greatly improved accessibility.

The rather small, fiddly interface of previous versions has been dumped in favour of a more user-friendly icon-based front end. Icons along the screen's left-hand edge divide Creator 2009's multitude of abilities into six neat headings - Home, Data-Copy, Video-Movies, Music-Audio, Photo and Online.

Simple tasks such as ripping and burning a CD, or just copying a DVD, now all seamlessly take place in the Home window, and only more advanced tasks find themselves launched in separate windows.

When you fire up the software, the first thing you'll be confronted with is the Home tab. This provides quick one-click access to your six most used Creator functions, so you don't have to go through and click the relevant Icon heading each and every time.

There's also a neat information tab along the right-hand edge which is split into three sections - Do more, Tutorials and Support - the latter is self explanatory, but the Do more and Tutorials entries are actually rather useful, especially for beginners.

Links to online PDF walkthroughs on topics such as converting and creating audiobooks from CD and MP3 sources - one of Creator's nifty new features - and setting up automatic backups are all welcome primers for getting to grips with Roxio's latest and greatest.

The Music-Audio tab covers a wide range of tasks. Transcoding and ripping of CDs to multiple formats - including the audiophile-friendly .wav and lossless .flac options - is quick and effortless and, most importantly, eminently straightforward.

New features added to the Music Disc Creator are mere novelties, however. The Beatmatch function aims to seamlessly blend from one track to another, but unless you supply it with tracks punctuated by a regular

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4/4 beat, such as techno or house, it tends to make a mess of things. It's possible to substitute failed blends with simple fades, but overall it's no match for the superior mixing ability of the, admittedly far pricier, Ableton Live, nor a human DJ for that matter.

The Automix function is similarly flawed. The idea is that you provide a handful of tracks and it automatically creates a suitable tracklist from your music library but, in operation, it often failed to find any matching tracks, despite the several albums of very similar material sitting in our music folder. The features are good for a bit of fun, but little more.

Turn your attentions to the Video tab, and most of the features are familiar from previous versions. For the technologically averse, quick and dirty video editing comes courtesy of CineMagic while VideoWave is still present and correct for more complex editing procedures.

One particularly neat addition, however, is the Drag and Drop Convert. With this it's possible to drop folders full of music, video and photos, and convert them en masse into formats that suit your portable media player's capabilities. For quickly converting storage-hungry audio and video to a more portable-friendly size, it's an absolute godsend. And, best of all, its tiny desktop footprint means that it's easy to pop it in a corner out of the way, and just throw files at it as and when the mood takes you.

Welcome news for those with HD camcorders is the addition of full AVCHD support. Editing, authoring and transcoding are all supported as standard. Support for burning Blu-ray discs costs an extra £15, but there's also the facility to author 40 minutes of AVCHD material to a standard single-layer DVD disc. Given the expense of Blu-ray writers and blank media, this is an option that we can imagine many consumers taking full advantage of.

The sheer breadth of Creator's abilities has always been its greatest selling point, and this new iteration is no exception. For £50 you get a comprehensive package capable of disc burning, basic photo editing and manipulation, music ripping, copying and transcoding, video editing and authoring - as well as a basic backup tool.

It comes as little surprise that none of these actually rival dedicated packages for quality or sheer power, but when buying standalone software would soon add up to hundreds of pounds, it's difficult to fault Creator 2009's wide range of talents.