Roxio, a division of Sonic Solutions, has made a significant upgrade to its popular digital media suite. Similar to Nero 7 (£44.95 ex. VAT), Easy Media Creator 8 (Best Current Price: £35.21 ex. VAT) merges relatively advanced technologies from Roxio and Sonic into a comprehensive suite of CD and DVD authoring, burning, photo, video, and music applications.
The key strength of Easy Media Creator 8 is that its impressive range of features extend the possibilities of digital media creation, management, preservation and sharing. And Roxio hasn't made the experience complicated, either. The new Media Creator Home, the central hub for navigating to any of the suite's 25 applications, allows you to launch specialised features or complete common tasks in just a few mouse clicks. The new Task Assistants also lead you quickly and intuitively through the creation of personalised projects.
More logical in design and layout, Media Creator Home provides immediate access to all the applications, features and capabilities of the suite. Media Creator Home is divided into project categories under which are descriptions of the tasks that you can accomplish in each. In addition, common features are now embedded to allow you to complete popular tasks in fewer mouse clicks and without needing to launch a full application - a feature we criticized in
Easy Media Creator 7.5.
Headlining the new music capabilities of Easy Media Creator 8 is DVD Music Disc, which lets you create DVDs with up to 50 hours of Dolby Digital-quality music. With enough room for approximately 65 albums, DVD Music Discs play back in standard set-top DVD players and feature attractive DVD menus and navigation by track, artist, genre, album or year - all accessed via remote control. Double-layer DVD media is now supported, and large files can now be automatically spanned across multiple discs and burned in multiple drives simultaneously.
Another industry first in Easy Media Creator 8 is MusicID, which acoustically fingerprints unknown music files to automatically fix or add the correct ID3 tag information such as title, artist, and genre. MusicID is a tremendous time saver for consumers using Easy Media Creator 8's feature for digitising classic LPs and tapes. Other audio features haven't been neglected. You can now burn a long audio compilation across multiple audio CDs simultaneously, and specify a play back order of MP3 and WMA files. You can also extract audio from DVDs to create audio CDs or MP3/WMA music tracks for use on portable players.
Easy Media Creator 8 uses Sonic Solutions' DVD authoring technology with the integration of the newest version of MyDVD. The relatively basic authoring application lets you create personalised DVDs with custom designs and full-motion multi-chapter menus. DVD movies can now be compressed and copied from 9GB to 4.7GB discs, with options for removing unwanted extras to optimise recording quality. In a similar fashion to compiling a mixed music CD, you can now create compilation DVDs of movies from different sources such as DVD-Video, DivX or WMV.
VideoWave, the suite's video-editing application, which includes automated video creation options as well as advanced hands-on controls, has been architected to work in real-time with HD video streams. In addition, Easy Media Creator 8 now includes DivX 6 support and TiVo Series 2 subscribers can now use the software to transfer, preview, and burn to DVD the shows you record on your home-networked TiVo digital video recorder.
Managing, editing and sharing photos is a snap and Easy Media Creator 8 now includes a series of Task Assistants that guide you through the creation of photo projects such as greeting cards, panoramas, calendars, and slideshows. We really liked the slideshow facility which enables you to produce slideshows with pan and zoom, title slides, background music, and voice over narration in a matter of minutes. Slideshows can then be exported to Video CD or DVD in standard or widescreen (16:9) format and even as DivX HD in 720p or 1080p files.
A particularly neat feature of Easy Media Creator 8 is the new LiveShare feature. LiveShare establishes a private peer-to-peer (P2P) connection so you can permit friends and family, via an e-mail Web link, to directly browse and download photos on your PC using any Web browser. Another innovative sharing option is My MediaSpace, which allows you to use your home network and UPnP-compliant living room devices to access and view media. Using My MediaSpace, you can share and access photo, music, and video files between home computers and view the content on your TV via a network connected set-top box.
Creator Backup enables you to create a backup copy of your files for safekeeping. You can back up data on your hard disk drive or network drives to CDs or DVDs. You can run backups manually, or schedule them to run once or on a regular basis. In addition, you can choose to encrypt the files on the disc so that the files can only be accessed by someone entering a password that you select. New to Creator Backup is the ability to create incremental backup projects.
In terms of file format support, Easy Media Creator 8 covers most bases. Input formats supported include AVI, DV-AVI, MPEG-1/2, MPEG-2HD, IFO/VOB, DivX, DivX-HD, XviD, DVR-MS, TiVo, ASF, AVI, DV, MOV, WMV, QT, Audio CD, MP3, WAV, WMA, Dolby Digital AC3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, M4A, MP4, JPEG, PNG,TIFF, BMP, and GIF. Output formats supported include AVI, DV-AVI, MPEG-1/2, DivX, WMV, MP3, WAV, WMA, Dolby Digital AC3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MPEG-1/2, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, and GIF, while video disc formats supported include DVD, Video CD (VCD), Super Video CD (SVCD) and Mini DVD, while recordable media formats include CD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD-R DL, DVD+R DL, and DVD-RAM.
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