Roxio Easy Media Creator 8 Winners

[Jason Dunn]

The winners of our <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/index.php?topic_id=9219">Roxio Easy Media Creator 8 giveaway</a> have been picked, and the following five people will be getting a copy:<br /><br /><b>rlobrecht:</b> <i>"Produce professional-quality DVDs with movable menus, resizable buttons and text credits. This will be a great addition when I want to bore my friends with videos of my son learning how to ride his bike."</i><br /><br /><b>BugDude10:</b> <i>"Personally, I have to go with the ability to work in 16:9 video format. (I shot a friend's wedding last year in widescreen mode on my camcorder, then discovered that neither Easy Media Creator v7 nor Muvee worked well with widescreen.)"</i><br /><br /><b>ChunkyMonkey:</b> <i>"Quickly restore a system without reinstalling Windows® (Internal floppy drive required for full system backup and recovery). I'm interested in trying out the backup functionality."</i><br /><br /><b>Mark from Canada:</b> <i>"Well, "Save time burning. Burn multi-disc projects to multiple burners at the same time." certainly sounds interesting...Well - seems like this one is almost worth a try again...Pick me, pick me."</i><br /><br /><b>rprice54:</b> <i>"The DVD audio feature is nice, I can finally use that feature on my DVD player...also like the unattended backups, very cool."</i><br /><br />Congratulations to all our winners! And if you didn't win, you can always <a href="http://thoughtsmedia.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=12781678/fd=1/sort_type=price">order a copy online</a>. Thanks to Roxio for the prize donation, I hope all the winners enjoy their copy.

[ChunkyMonkey]

Yea! I was just about to buy this program.

Thanks, Jason!

[rlobrecht]

Thanks Jason. Yeah Thoughts Media and Roxio.

[Mark from Canada]

Yes, Oh Yes. Thank you.
I haven't tried Roxio in a long while, and this is perfect.
Thank you.

[BugDude10]

I said it in my e-mail response, and I'll say it here in public: Thanks, Jason, and thanks to Roxio as well!

As an aside, I know you're not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth, but...

I just installed the package on Saturday afternoon. I ran the Media Manager to find and to catalogue all of the media on my system (photos, tunes, and video clips). After running for several hours, I decided to restart my system (to force it finally to stop), then ran the Media Manager again to see what it found. It seems to have found all my stuff (although not my Digital Rebel RAW files, so this won't replace PSE for me). I noticed that the folder tree on the left-hand side kept refreshing itself for no apparent reason.

Later, I discovered that all of the media files that Media Manager found now had new file-stamp dates -- all were now dated sometime Saturday afternoon. This alone isn't a huge deal; while I have scrupulously kept all of my digital photos with their original file dates (just for fast reference), almost all photo apps read the photo date from the EXIF info, so this change (by itself) shouldn't affect my photo-management.

What I wonder about, though, is what else, if anything, was Media Manager doing to my files. We all know that opening a JPEG then re-saving it causes some additional image degradation, which is a bad thing; was Media Manager opening, modifying, then re-saving my JPEGs? Or is there just something about the cataloging process that changed the file-stamp date?

I decided to visit the Roxio web site to look for an answer. When I couldn't find one (no real surprise there), I tried to avail myself of Roxio's support site. To log in, one must enter one's name and password, and enter the code from an image (presumably to stop bots); however, the login page wouldn't display the code image! (Every time, I got the little IE square/circle/triangle graphic that takes the place of the missing image.)

I finally decided to send an e-mail to the webmaster complaining about this problem. After doing so, however, my e-mail to "[email protected]", the address provided on the site, was returned with a delivery-failure notice.

So, as I type this, I don't know what, if anything, Media Manager did to my files as it catalogued them, I can't log into Roxio's support site because of the missing code image, and I can't contact Roxio to let it know of the login problem.

FWIW, the package looks pretty, although I haven't really had a chance to get into the different apps to see how well they all work. And, of course, I'm still very grateful to DMT (and Roxio) for the great gift. Just thought someone might be interested in my experience with EMC8 so far.

[Mark from Canada]

Later, I discovered that all of the media files that Media Manager found now had new file-stamp dates -- all were now dated sometime Saturday afternoon. This alone isn't a huge deal; while I have scrupulously kept all of my digital photos with their original file dates (just for fast reference), almost all photo apps read the photo date from the EXIF info, so this change (by itself) shouldn't affect my photo-management.

I am very happy to have won the program as well, but for me, this is a huge deal. I had a selection of a few hundred daily comics which now all have the same date...

I removed Media Manager and am just on the way to remove the extra data and recover my space.
The media database is not removed on uninstall and can be found at C:\Documents and Settings\[USERNAME]\Application Data\Roxio\MediaManager8
The hidden files are quite a bit harder to remove and the best program so far is ADS Spy by Merijn http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html. Still a lot of work, but other programs I have tested are even worse.
The other option is to move the files to a FAT32 drive and then back.

There is a thread at the Roxio site at http://boards.support.roxio.com/roxio/board/message?board.id=emc8_install&amp;message.id=367#M367

I am very sorry I installed the media manager portio since it is impossible to recover the original file dates :(

The burning seems working fine though and my wife likes to create DVD slideshows from pictures with it and found it to be the best she had tried.

Mark

[Jason Dunn]

That's indeed VERY disturbing about the Media Manager. I've only just installed v8 onto a new laptop that doesn't have any data on it yet, so maybe that's why I didn't see it. Based on the thread you referenced (and this response from Roxio (http://boards.support.roxio.com/roxio/board/message?board.id=emc8_install&message.id=375#M375)) it sounds like when Roxio injects the ADS data into the file it changes the last modified date, which gives the results you're seeing. I agree that's completely unacceptable, as I too place great value in last modified date for sorting photos. In fact even when I edit a photo I always want it to retain the last modified date since that's how I usually sort - most photo viewing programs don't allow you to sort by EXIF date taken as easily as by last modified date.

[Mark from Canada]

OK. After a bit more searching on the web I found a program that can redate jpg files according to their EXIF data. It is Exifer and can be found at http://www.friedemann-schmidt.com/software/exifer/.
The function is under Edit->Rename/redate...
It can work on single files or batches in one folder. Just make sure you de-select the rename and do select the redate in the form befire hitting OK. It seems to do the trick.
At least some dates can be recovered that way...

[BugDude10]

I compared my post-Media Manager photo files to versions I had archived on CDs awhile back, and while the PC-files are now all dated 11/26 (and the file sizes are slightly larger), the files themselves appear to be unchanged. (I checked the EXIF data on pre- and post-MM files and they were all identical. And the portrait shots were not rotated and re-saved.) So it appears that, while MM did change something, it doesn't appear that it harmed any of the pictures. If Exifer fixes this issue, then I'm not nearly as worried about Media Manager as I was before.

Of course, that doesn't help with other files (like scanned photos or daily comics files)...

[BugDude10]

Oh, and it's nice to see that someone was able to get onto Roxio's support site! :?

[Rox_Rep]

We (Roxio) wanted to take the time to respond to the discussion regarding Media Manager in Easy Media Creator 8; although, to a large extent most of the questions have already been answered. The most important thing for us to add is simply this: We very much appreciate the feedback, and are listening. We agree with the points made on this site and will modify the behavior of Media Manager so that it does not change file dates. This will be made available in the near future via a program update.

To follow up on some of the other issues mentioned:
On the issue of contacting Roxio: We have tested the support login pages using various browsers and have not experienced anything similar to what the user notes. We believe the problem may be due to interference by an Internet security application.

On the “tree flashing”. The tree view may ‘flash’ if it is being refreshed (scanning new files on the system). Once the scan is complete, the ‘flashing’ will stop.

Again, we thank Digital Media Thoughts readers for their feedback and do hope the contest winners do find additional reasons to enjoy our product.

[Jason Dunn]

We agree with the points made on this site and will modify the behavior of Media Manager so that it does not change file dates. This will be made available in the near future via a program update.

Thanks for coming into the forum to respond - that's nice to see. It's great that this issue will be fixed with a patch, but if I understand the issue correctly, that won't help. My understanding is that this is how it goes:

1) User installs Creator 8
2) User reboots
3) Media Manager begins scanning after the reboot and changes the files
4) User updates Creator 8, downloads the patch so that Media Manager won't change the files...but by then it's too late

If that really the way it will go down, the only real solution is to issue new installs CDs to customers so that they get a version of Creator 8 without this problem.

[BugDude10]

Perhaps the patch can include the same routine that Exifer uses to restore file-stamp dates to photo files? (Of course, that doesn't help our friend with the daily comics scans, or anyone with audio/video files or scanned pictures, but it's better than nothing.)

Something I found interesting: When I wanted to test the new .WMA playablility feature of the new PSP update (v2.60), I copied a CD-worth of tunes to my PSP and got a warning that the transfer wouldn't include the additional file data that Media Manager added to my .WMA files. I clicked "OK" and transferred the files, and they played fine on my PSP.

And, Roxio, thanks for listening and posting. That's good customer service!