Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 10 (OLD VERSION)

• Easily produce impressive multi-media projects that combine photos, video and music; share and enjoy on CD, DVD, the web or on popular portable players and cell phones
• Includes step-by-step video tutorials that lead users through the process of completing a wide range of personal digital-media projects
• Backup non-encrypted DVD-Videos or convert video files into preferred formats for use on an iPod, PSP, Windows Media portable device or mobile phone
• Powerful 32 track video editor with HD support and studio quality tools, effects, and transitions; edit and enhance photos, creating delightful photo projects and gifts
• New features and capabilities that are specifically designed to naturally extend the digital-media functionality of Vista

Creator Suite 10 does it all (or at least anything I could possibly want to do). Audio, video, data, photos, media devices, label creation and more. You can download directly from a camera, camcorder, iPod, cell phone and most portable devices. It has a sound editor to capture sound from DVDs and other sources. It even converts LPs and cassettes to digital sound from a stereo input. DVDs are easy to create and users can add soundtracks using their own music catalog. The program screens are well organized, with helpful wizards to get a user started with every feature.

I recently purchased a new HP tablet laptop with Windows Vista. Windows Vista does not work with older versions of many software programs. I already own Nero Burning Rom and Easy CD Creator 6. Neither would work with Vista. Creator Suite 10 runs perfectly with Vista. Also, older Roxio products do not do DVD burning and my version of Roxio will not rip from CDs to create MP3s (which is why I had bought Nero). I had never created DVDs before getting this program. But, it worked perfectly with the Lightscribe DVD drive, and I easily created a DVD from MPEGS, added chapter inserts and customized the menu. It played in our 5-disc DVD player with no issues. Burning CDs was just as simple.

So, why 4 stars and not 5? First, doing it all is great unless you're never going to use it. A $100 retail price is a little high for some users. Other than the DVD and CD burning, I am unlikely to use the product to do photo manipulation and the myriad other features available. I already own other programs that do these things, that I am more skilled at using. Second, it will likely not work in an older system. I tried loading this on my 2 year old Averatec laptop running Windows XP. I could not get the software to install. I ran DSKCHK when prompted by Windows, but the disk would run loudly in my drive and go nowhere. I did install it on a Dell GX620 system running XP with no problem, so it is the laptop (or drive), not XP, that's the problem.

If you have an older computer, or just want to burn CDs, you may want to go with a cheaper media program. If you've got a brand new system with Windows Vista, I cannot recommend Easy Media Creator Suite 10 enough.

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I will admit it, I have always been intimidated by the idea of purchasing and using video editing software. The very thought conjured a thousand questions/anxieties: How do I transfer my movies from my device to my computer? I know how to transfer movies from my digital camera, but what if I want to transfer movies from a camcorder, will they work on my computer? Do I need different software? If I edit the movie, will I permanently lose the scenes I cut? How much space will this software and these movies take up on my computer? Can I stitch photos together to make a movie?

Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 put my fears to rest. This easy to use software comes equipped with a great wizard program which acts as a tutorial, guiding you through the various procedures, step-by-step.

I am not a techie, so I can't talk about the technical aspects of this software program, nor can I compare it to other comparable programs.

What I can tell you is this:

I performed two functions with this software and was very, very pleased:

1. I shot a home video with my digital camera. It was a film of my children's musical recital. There was a lot of background noise which annoyed me and distracted from the performance. I was able to reduce the background noise without ruining the video.

I was also able to add a sound track to a soundtrack to some movies using SmartSound.

2. Using Mobile Phone Doctor, I was able to greatly improve the quality of some photos I took this summer at Disneyworld. I really liked the photos but was not pleased with the clarity. Using this software, I was able to sharpen the details to the point I was hoping.

The pro: This software is easy to use.

The con: This program complements Windows Vista, which I do not have. I think it would have been nice if it was advertised or marked on thebox that the user will be able to use a lot of features if they have Windows Vista...that it is a necessary complimentary program.

Read Best Reviews of Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 10 (OLD VERSION) Here

I'm always a bit leery of Big Software: packages that try to do too much, install too many components, try to get their hooks set all over your system. So I was a bit leery installing the newest release of Roxio Easy Media Creator, which has been growing rapidly into bloat-ware in recent releases. It turned out that Ipleasantly surprised to find it more streamlined, cleaner, and professional-looking than previously.

Although one of the big "enhancements" in this release is Vista support, I tested this package on my Windows XP Pro machine, on which I was previously running Roxio Creator 9. I cleanly removed Creator 9 first since installing on top of an old version is always a bad idea, many software complaints seem to arise from not uninstalling the old software first. Install was straightforward if a bit slow to run on my Inpiron Dual Core system.

My primary purpose in buying Roxio, like many of you, is to create media. Burning CDs, DVDs, etc is the core strength of Roxio, and they continue to do this well. One of my frequent tasks is burning CDs from ISO images. Roxio did this with literally 4 clicks, nice and easy.

The master control panel has been streamlined and it's now easier to get to all of the functions of the package.

Some of the old bloat is gone (the "ringtone maker" is no longer included), although big extraneous components like the PhotoSuite photo editor and audiox mixing tools remain. Those may be useful to the neophyte, but anybody wanting to really tweak their photos is likely to fire up an Adobe product, or something that came with their camera, or with their computer, or some other full featured package. Including such superfluous programs in a Media Creator suite (when they are available from so many other sources) seems excessive, but I guess it lets the publisher lengthen the feature list.

Other major enhancements include support for Blu-Ray, HD DVD, and HD video, though I didn't have the equipment to check out that new functionality.

If you don't need the Vista support, or the enhanced DVD support, there's not a burning reason (pun intended!) to upgrade from Roxio Creator Suite 9 to Roxio Creator Suite 10. But if you're in the market, this is a fine product and does its core media work as advertised.

While I wish it were more streamlined still, the software works well, installs easily, and has become more streamlined than before. Recommended with a 5 star rating.

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Maybe it's my computer, although everything else except this runs fine. It took me over two hours just to install this, it kept locking up and stalling. I had to keep rebooting. Finally got it loaded, took forever to open it. Got it opened, started looking thru it's features and inadvertently closed it down, haven't been able to open it up again since. Have restarted the computer three or four times and the program just won't open.

I have an older version of this that runs great, this new version though is a total waste. I'll probably just end up removing it unless I can somehow get it to work. For now though it's just useless.

UPDATE: After getting a corrected copy of the software, I reinstalled it. The product does function similar to previous versions. I burned a copy of a DVD and it went smoothly and without problems. There are a lot of features in this software, unless you're a complete AV geek, you'll probably find that there's more here than you need. But some features are just good to have. The installation is apparently the most complicated aspect of this software, the instructions don't tell you, but you need to remove any and ALL traces of previous versions, most software will overwrite existing versions, this does not. I ended up having to save everything to my hard drive and install from there. This is a glitch that hopefully the people at Roxio will rectify soon.

Once you get over the hurdle of installation, you're on your way.

I used one of the very early versions of Roxio a long time ago and did not like their menu system so I switched to Nero, which at that time was a bare-bones simple CD burning application. I have used Nero ever since as I watched it get bloated with more and more "features" that had little or nothing to do with CD/DVD burning. Nero is truly several separate applications rather than a suite, and the CD/DVD burning portion is capable but very dated. My new computer came pre-loaded with Roxio Creator 9 so I have been using it for several months and had no problems with it. I liked some of the new features of Creator 10 when it was introduced but was completely scared away by all of the negative, and even hostile, reviews. Recently I was able to buy it for 39 after rebates and figured I couldn't go wrong for the price. After using it for a while here are my first impressions:

The variety and usefulness of the included applications is amazing. Even at full price I think it is one of the best software bargains in the world. I have tried each of the apps, though not in depth, at this point and they each work. My favorite is the audio capture function. Unlike everything else out there that requires several steps to capture audio, Creator 10 installs a widget on your screen in which you simple press a red "record" button to capture a clip. After the capture is completed you are taken to a very easy to use audio editing screen where you can trim and equalize your clip before saving it to a variety of popular formats. This application alone is worth the price of the entire bundle.

Also included are a competent backup program, nice media player (but come on, who needs another media player with Microsoft, Apple and Real dominating the market?), label creator, media manager (a cool app that catalogs all those unlabeled CD/SVD disks you have laying around), apps to easily create music and video compilations, a nice photo editing app plus a panorama photo stitcher, a pretty capable video editing program (although I'm puzzled why it can't read FLV files), a cassette/LP converter tool, and about 10 more highly useful tools.

Negatives? Well first of all I will semi-dispute what several reviewers have said about it freezing their system on installation. I thought so too, and then realized that a full install was loading over 50,000 files into my computer and even though I have a very powerful computer, the process took almost 45 minutes, making it the longest load time for any software I've ever owned. Where Roxio messed up is that the install screen only has a simple message that "installation may take several minutes". There are long periods ... like a couple of minutes at a time ... where the status bar does nothing and you would swear your computer is frozen. You just have to have a lot of patience and resist the urge to terminate the install, which may be why some people have had so much trouble with the software. Roxio could save a lot of frustration by making the install process a little more clear.

My other concern is that my anti-virus and anti-spyware programs (from two different companies) both identified Creator 10 as mal-ware. I would like to know more about what information Roxio is gathering from my computer and how they are using it. Software companies should be more open with their customers about such things.

Bottom line is that I don't think Creator 10 is as bad as some people make it out to be. Today's computers are incredibly complex and there seems to be a tendency to blame hardware or software for lack of understanding of how computers work. Other than your operating system, Creator 10 is probably one of the most complicated things you can install on your computer and there is no doubt it will have a noticeable effect on performance. If you choose to go with Creator 10 make sure you have a very capable system with plenty of hard drive space and as much memory as you can afford. I'm giving it 4 stars because I think overall the positives outweigh the negatives.