TrustedReviews: Roxio Easy Media Creator 9

[Jason Eaton]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.trustedreviews.com:80/article.aspx?art=3501' target='_blank'>http://www.trustedreviews.com:80/article.aspx?art=3501</a><br /><br /></div><i>"If there's one thing you can never seem to get enough of these days, it's software. There's always something you want to be able to do with your PC that Windows, despite its myriad of extra bits and pieces, tools and utilities just doesn't seem to cover. And with the explosion in digital audio and video over the past few years, it's something that seems to be happening more and more. What if you need to burn a disc from an ISO image? What if you want to encode your music files to a format other than WMA or MP3? What if you want to capture and edit audio directly to MP3? What if you want to do more than just look at the photos you've snapped and the video footage you've shot on your DV camcorder on your PC? The answer is, usually, to hunt down some decent freeware or buy something off-the-shelf to do each job as you need it. But wouldn't it be nice if the tools were just there, ready for you to use whenever you needed them? Enter Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite, which aims to do just that – put all of the tools you need, right at your fingertips."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/roxio.jpg" /> <br /><br />Those fine folks over at TrustedReviews have taken Roxio's new Easy Media Creator 9 for a spin and have come away with smiles. If your looking for a PC application that will let you do a lot of things to multimedia files, but don't want to break the bank, this might be for you. I know I am tempted to take it for a spin.

[Vincent Ferrari]

I had really REALLY soured on Roxio products a long time ago. Honestly, I figured they were doomed to the dustbin next to programs that were overloaded with features I didn't need and bloatware I didn't want. It seems, though, that somewhere along the line, they got the idea that people wanted to do more with media and they could do more than just offer you a way to transfer your media to a CD / DVD, and at that point, their software became useful again.

I can't try this, being on a Mac and all, but I can definitely say I would. I do use Roxio Toast on a regular basis and think it's one of the best programs of its kind that I've ever used.

It's really nice to see that they've cleaned up their act.

[randalllewis]

I bought Creator 9 when it was released because of on going issues with Pinnacle Studio 10. Studio is far more versitile when its comes to editing than Creator, but Creator installs and works while I could never get Studio 10 to work on a stable basis and their fix to the problems of Studio 10 (the 10.6 patch) would simply not install no matter what tweaks I was instructed to make or how many times I sat through the lengthy uninstall/reinstall process. So it was bye-bye Pinnacle for me. I found over the years that my video editing tends to be rather straightforward and Creator offers all I need. Creator also claims to be compatible with Vista. That was another reason I selected it. Studio 10 is barely compatible with XP, I am sure it won't work at all with Vista.

One simple caveat about Creator. It won't launch if you have the IE7 beta installed on your computer. The Roxio boards are full of posts on this and it is an issue known to Microsoft. The program wants to contact Roxio for authentication on first launch and for some reason, IE7 won't let it. Some users report that after that first launch, you can install IE7 and Creator will work fine at that point. I have not tried that.

[Jason Eaton]

This is good stuff to hear. I usually do most of my media stuff on the Mac as the iLife suite does most everything I need. I turned away from PC multimedia after years of being frustrated, but every now and then a little voice calls out saying things have changed and I become a little more curious.

$79 dollars is just over the cusp for curiosity sake though. While not much for everything you get ,what I have now still works, so keep the thoughts coming. Who knows if enough good things are shared I might just break down and put a quick showdown piece together.

[Vincent Ferrari]

If you use your Mac's Superdrive (I'm assuming you have a SuperDrive, for God's sake this is a Digital Media site LOL) with any degree of regularity, you'll like the convenience (and speed) of Toast. In fact, one of my fave features is the one click conversion from DivX movie to standard DVD.

Killer.

It works really well, and I didn't feel bad after installing it, which was a welcome change of pace for me.

[ctmagnus]

I'm not too fond of their upgrade policy. I bought version 7 three weeks before version 8 was released. I could not find any info on their site regarding an upgrade policy, so I phoned them. Their only offer was to let me order the new version over the phone while they still had me on the line, rather than offer any kind of discount or anything like that. I bought Acronis TrueImage the same day I bought Easy Media Creator 7 and Acronis gave me a free upgrade to the next version that was also released a few weeks later.

[Vincent Ferrari]

Damn. That seriously sucks... :evil: