Roxio Creator 2009

Plentiful media-management features come at a high price


IT CAN'T BE EASY for a mature software suite to remain relevant year after year, version after version, especially amid increasingly tough competition from commercial products and free tools. Such products must work ever harder to improve themselves, even when it seems like there's nothing left needing improvement. How has Roxio managed this with its $99.99 Creator 2009, the latest version of its ridiculously comprehensive
media-authoring suite? As it turns out, the update reflects both innovation and desperation.

Creator 2009 comes with a heavily revamped and streamlined Interface that makes it easier to find the most common tasks while adding a serious dose of elegant visual appeal. While the launcher for last year's
version, Easy Media Creator 10 Suite, was useful, it contained visual bloat that complicated the process of finding exactly the app you wanted. Creator 2009, however, has a scrubbed-up launcher that puts your six most commonly used functions front and center on the home page. Broader category listings (Data-Copy, Video-Movies, Music-Audio, Photo, and Online) are on the left, and links to videos, tutorials, and support options are on the right. You also
have the option to choose any of the category pages as your start page by simply clicking a pushpin icon next to the category header—a nice touch for personalizing the experience.
You have almost as much control over everything else you do in Creator 2009, as well. Want to burn data onto a CD? Use a simple drag-and-drop interface, a more advanced Explorer-style window, or even a backup utility to save whole folders with a single click. You're granted the same flexibility when it comes to video editing: Creator 2009 can make your video clips and photos into a movie automatically, or you can drag and drop everything into an advanced storyline or timeline view to arrange everything just the way you want it. For DVD
creation, the program lets you select from any number of pregenerated options or develop your own from scratch; similarly, ripping music horn a CD can be either a mindless or a more detailed process.

There's plenty of other useful functionality to be found, too: a three-step wizard for digitizing LPs and tapes, as well as modules for capturing audio directly from a sound card, converting content for easy playback on your portable devices, and sharing photos and videos using Roxio's integrated online services.

Not all of the available options are essential. A new function called "beat-matching" will rearrange and adjust the cross fades of music tracks you're burning to CD to create ideal dance mixes that flow smoothly from one song to the next. There's not much call for this, and in our tests it
didn't work very well: Vocals and tempos were frequently distorted, to distracting effect. (We recommend sticking with instrumental tracks with heavy beats for best results.) And while some users will undoubtedly appreciate the ability to automatically break audiobooks into workable chunks for a portable music player, we're not convinced that's a vital feature that couldn't already be decently replicated via Creator 2009's other audio-editing tools.

Alas, many of Creator 2009's functions have an antiquated quality about them anyway—Windows Vista and some freely available apps let you do many of the same things at roughly equivalent quality. True, Roxio's photo-editing feature is rather more robust than Windows Photo Gallery, with dedicated tools for removing wrinkles, blemishes, dust, and scratches and for fixing other imperfections. But the Roxio video-editing and DVD-authoring apps are more or less on par with Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker, and dedicated music managers such as Windows Media Player, Mines, and Zune have friendlieruser interfaces and can more conveniently catalog and spin songs than the Roxio tools can.



Creator 2009 has another shortcoming that should be a strength: HD. Although you can create Blu -ray discs with content directly from an AVCHD camcordet, you can't otherwise burn Blu-ray out of the box. For that, you'll need to drop $29.99 on an additional Blu-ray plug-in. bringing the total bill up to almost $130. And, even for that much money, you still won't be able to play Blu-ray discs using Creator 2009: for that, you'll need something like CyberLink's PowerDVD or Cores WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray. We understand the issues having to do with licensing fees and content-protection regulations, but it's still a notable omission in a package that offers so much else. —Matthew Murray

www.roxio.com

Computer Shopper January 2009