Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 Gratis
Even though I read a lot of the reviews here on Amazon, my decision to purchase this product was based upon a review in the July 2004 issue of Maximum PC, a highly-regarded magazine. This review gave Creator 7 a 9 out of 10 rating, and a 'kick ass' award by the editors. It says Easy CD Creator 7 is a 'Huge, comprehensive suite of excellent products behind an effortless interface' and 'Easy CD Creator's new front-end interface dispenses with the eye candy and replaces it with a beautifully simple and elegant text-based interface'. I trust Maximum PC and its professional reviews.I just bought a new PC and was looking for a CD burning software package. I bought this product based on recommendations, Roxio reputation and $40 in rebates. I made a mistake and should have gone with Nero.
EMC7 will just quit in the middle of some operations, mostly when it works with big files. When I point to some DVD files and try to open them, the program will shut down. No erros or nothing like that, it will just quit.
Roxio released 2 major updates (about 200MB in total size) which fixed some of the issues. Still, even after upgrades, the program hangs and prevents my system from shutting down. You have to manually kill one of the running background processes to get the system to turn off. The only great thing about EMC7 is user groups. If you have a problem do not ask Roxio their email support is slow and inaccurate.
Instead, use Roxio user forums. Your questions and problems will be answered within a day and the staff is extremely helpful. Not their fault Roxio is pushing bloatware. Easy Media Creator 7 offers an easy to learn and understand interface that enables you to quickly use any of the applications that make up this integrated software suite. There's many powerful tools available that I can't possibly mention them all here.
A couple of my favorite tools are: DISC COPIER - Last night I used it to copy a DVD of my daughter's recent high school band field show competitions that was made by another band parent. The DVD copying feature worked great and I mailed the high quality DVD copy to her Grandma this morning. VIDEOWAVE - I also enjoy using the timeline video-editing feature to edit my videos like the professionals.This product is so good I think it should be rated 6 out of 5 stars!
Some would say that a departure from the burning focus that has served them well is risky; however, after working with this program, I'd say not. This is an exceptional application. It has the grace of iLife, but with power to spare.
The video applciation (videowave) is outstanding, as are Creator Classic, and DVD Builder. The only weakness I see is in their Drag to Disc which does not always behave well (in my tests at least). That being said, nothing comes close.
And at the price, it's a no brainer. I brought the program because I had Easy Media 5 and was happy with it. Unfortunately this package seems to have a lot of problems. My first was loading - it seemed to take forever to load into my system which is a 1 year old Dell 2.4 Ghz system. Next it runs very slow. I did not have too much trouble dragging and dropping slides into the package to make a DVD slide show, but when I hit the burn button it took over 40 minutes for the program to complete the burning process. During this process, my screens were partially opening and freezing, like they used to do years ago with the early versions of windows when you did not have enough memory.
Well I finally got the product, popped it into my DVD player and the slides are all fuzzy. I put this down to TV screen resolution till I took the DVD back to my computer and ran it there. I had the same result - fuzzy pictures, which seemed to be shimmying on my screen. Norton partition magic 8.0 full.
I was very disappointed. To make matters worse, this DVD of about 250 slides was made from a selection of about 1700 slides which I very carefully loaded into the system. When I tried to open these files again to re burn the DVD, I found out that none of the files was accessable. I could see them on the slide show files, but when I tried to drag them into a new production, the computer could not find them. I have contacted customer service, but it is now 5 days and counting, without anything but a 'we got your message' message.So, I would say, if you have a lot of time to wait around while the burner burns and you don't care so much about quality, then this is a product for you.
Otherwise look elsewhere. PC World rates the Ahead Nero 6 pretty good, I guess I will give that a try. Even on my 4+ year-old 1.6Ghz Pentium 4 PC running Windows XP Home edition, Easy Media Creator 7 runs great. It installed fine and continues to run great now that I upgraded to Windows XP SP2. Using the Roxio Updater (Tools - Extras & Utilities - Roxio Updater) I also downloaded the free upgrade to version 7.0.1 of the software. During my 6 months of use I contacted Roxio's customer tech support a few times via email, and every time they got back to me within a day or so with answers to my questions. That's pretty darn impressive support for software costing well under $100.
Beyond the technical stuff, this software is pretty amazing on how easy it is to use and how quickly I was creating some way cool looking DVDs of my home movies and digital pictures. I can't say enough about this powerful, easy to use program.
I use it all the time for doing backups, burning my music CDs and creating VCDs and DVDs. The photo editing and slideshow creation tools are perfect for a digital photography buff like myself. Yesterday I went to the Salinas Airshow and took 100s of pictures of the Blue Angels, Canadian Snowbirds and Red Baron Squadron's flying show, as well as all the other aircraft on display. In no time I turned my photos into a great little slideshow. It doesn't get much easier.
Roxio Easy Media Creator Support
Faster, better, easier and more - that's what you get with new Roxio Easy Media Creator Supersonic! With Creator, burning and copying CDs and DVDs has never been so fast, creating videos or photo-slideshows has never been easier. Edit music, photos and video to perfection and enjoy them where, when and how you want! Now also includes complete PC backup - to protect all your data, media files and projects. A single click can access regular tasks, recent projects and a range of powerful applications. It's time to get creative, it's time to go Supersonic!