Customer Reviews

Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 10 (OLD VERSION)

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(100)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Over the years I've stuck with Roxio Easy Media Creator Suites since I'm used to the programs and have always found them to be reliable. Also I can get user rebates and think the price is still good. For those new to Creator it has tools and programs for digital media. This category is huge but Creator does a good job of covering much of the range.
Originally I bought Creator to deal with my video tapes to transfer to digital. The deluxe version has a video converter. I liked the video programs well enough but I'm surprised that version 10 has more additions. Most obvious is the YouTube video optimizing feature. It is also better at adding soundtracks to video and slideshows. The are more tools and effects. Although it doesn't have tv broadcast streaming, it does have tivo file features. My tivo unit broke so now I burn dvds for the dvd player so I can view them on my pc. I even noticed that when I transfer photos to my cellphone I can eliminate the bars. In 9 I also experienced a C++ overrun problem that would appear now and then. The Roxio Web support site had instructions on how to deal with it. I see that the problem never occurred on the same pc in version 10. As long as Roxio keeps improving and adding, I'll keep upgrading.

There are too many good things to say about this product. Since I received it I have been trying to use its many features, and I have not been disappointed. It combines speed of CD/DVD burning with ease of use. It is also very intuitive, though, sometimes you have to just allow the application to guide you, because some of the tasks are now done differently compared to the previous versions.
The only downside to this great product is that it could be a memory hog. This is not unexpected in my opinion, considering the many tasks that it now undertakes with ease. I recommend this product most heartily, and I am confident that you'll find it very useful.

I've been making mixes of my music since the days of lps and cassette tapes. I've used and researched many varieties of software for this, including earlier versions of Roxio. I have to say, with EMC version 10, Roxio seems to have really gotten it right!

Some strengths:
- EMC sees all your music, but doesn't force you into its single management system like Itunes or Windows Media Player. You simply drag and drop either from a master sortable list of tracks and artists or from your own file structure, into an album or project you can manipulate any way you want.
- Making customized crossfades is a breeze! Other programs either make you use the same overlap or gap for every transition, or use a complicated sound wave editing format. EMC10 just lists the songs in your mix and includes buttons for the length of the overlap and the kind of crossfade.
- When you make a mix with crossfades, it still retains track markers so you can jump between tracks, unlike some other programs that force the whole mix into a single mp3.
- Important: automatic track volume leveling actually works! And you can manually adjust the volume of individual tracks without leaving your mix project, along with other effects like equalizing or eliminating clicks.
- The mixes burn nicely on CDs and play flawlessly on CD players. You don't know how many coasters I've made over the years.

There are other features if you want, sound editing and exporting to portable music players and such. There's a decent CD labeling program, although for some reason it doesn't provide a good way to list both songs and artists (you have to rename songs to include the artist name as well). And of course there's all this other stuff about photos and videos which I guess could come in handy but it doesn't get in the way.

All in all I have to say Roxio has made my favorite hobby of making personal music mixes fun and fast so I can concentrate on the sound. Thank you, Roxio!

There's a lot of opinions and the diversity may be due to the wide range of computers and configurations. My new Epson printer doesn't even work with Vista so nothing can be taken for granted. Begin with your pc specs-- mine is a Vista 2GB RAM, AMD Turion 64 x 2. No where near top of the line but should be more than adequate for digital media. Disk Authoring is still the greatest strength in Easy Media. Everyone has their preference for digital editing, but I have not found anything more straight forward than Roxio's disk burning programs. Some people blame the program for makng bad disks but this program removes many user errors. It's possible to pick the wrong format for a disk and this program helps by recognizing the blank disk and listing the best possibilities. It is also more reliable to make a virtual disk and copy from there than to do a direct disk to disk copy. The track by track method is longer and more prone to errors. I did find that the utilities were able to fix some disk errors. No program can burn 100% error free so a good utility is essential.

Video Editing is more complete than I thought possible in a suite. First there are 2 completely different video programs. One is simple and can be used right away. the other--videowave is a complete video editor. I'm not attached to any other program so I didn't mind learing the ins and outs. In short it works by layers so you can take sections and add/delete sound and effects. Photosuite is much like other programs although it isn't for pixel editing. But it does have more advanced features than normal suite programs like quick redeye deletion, cloning, brightness and contrast adjustment. Audio editing is again complete if not the most advanced program available. I noticed the sound capture program which isn't so common. It makes playlists and also has the unique feature of automatic song info insertion. Is it too much? Maybe if you already have programs for digital media. For me it is much simplier to have all the programs together and linked. Also I don't have to worry about upgrading individual programs and can stick to the one suite.

I was leery of this software after reading the reviews, but I needed an all-in-one product that converts audio files,makes home movie to DVD creation a snap, and a few other things-so I gave it a try. My computer is running XP SP2 with a Pentium 4(3Ghz)CPU on 2 Gigs of RAM.

I was pleasantly surprised and relieved to find that this really does almost anything you can think of in the media department-AFTER I figured out how to stop the little program Creator 10 had running in the background that was zapping 90% of my CPU. (It was in the taskbar, I think) After doing a quick google on that little background program, I found it to be a common problem and easily removed it..and haven't had issues since.

After over a month, I haven't tried all of the features (there's A LOT) but it has been completely stable and BUG FREE for even the largest tasks I've thrown at it (converting hundreds of video and music files) with no issues at all. I have found myself smiling numerous times, marveling at what this thing can do. The ID tag editor is awesome as well, it renames music files (in quick and easy batches)to whatever you want...no more finding 8 "greatest hits" folders in your music collection and wondering what they are.

I'm no power user, but I do know my way around a computer rather well, and this scratched every itch I had for tweaking everything I could think of with my media. As others have noted, there isn't super in-depth features here, but if you are looking to tweak every aspect of your editing,mixing,etc., why are you looking at this product anyways?

Anyways,with the price that you can pick this up (I got mine direct from roxio for less w/coupons) it's practically a steal. By buying a direct download, I knew I was getting the most updated (less buggy!!)version.

For all the pluses, I have found a few negatives as well:
-Exporting video files when making home movies to DVD takes an excruciatingly long time-about 3 hours for a full DVD.
-Certain parts of the program can take a couple seconds to load up.
-You can't save the list of music that you picked to convert.If you cancel, you have to pick your music again.
-Although it was easy for me, initially having to get rid of that little CPU hog background program could be an annoyance.(that was a one-time thing though)It's worth it.

Bottom line: If you are looking for a do-it-all software for cheap, this is it. There is a 30-day guarantee offered by roxio, and it beats Nero. I tried Nero, and it seems that Nero practically took over my computer. Nero was everywhere! It also messed up my autoplay for cd's and dvd's, wouldn't let me change its autoplay control, and NeroHome had a slowww interface that didn't really have a point.Try Roxio First!