If you burn a lot of CDs and/or DVDs, a full-fledged CD creation program may be a worthwhile investment. Roxio’s Easy CD & DVD Creator is one of the best known names in this software field. As a matter of fact, you may already have a lite version of CD Creator since it comes preinstalled on many computers with writable CD drives.
The full version of CD Creator has much added functionality over the lite version. You can easily copy and/or create CDs. The new AudioCentral includes everything you need to rip, play, edit, organize and burn digital music. It will even allow you to convert analog tapes and music into digital format. If you are into pictures, you can create electronic photo albums, slide shows with the included PhotoSuite Limited Edition. If you have a DVD burner, you can also use the new DVD Builder to create DVD movies with professional transitions and animated menus. You can even create VideoCDs which can be made with a writable CD drive and played in a DVD drive. This is great for using your CD burner to create photo slide shows with music that can be played on a DVD player attached to the television. And, of course, you can use the CD & DVD Creator to backup your files.
Best of all, Roxio has made creating CDs and DVDs easy. Installation is quick and easy. The interface is intuitive, so the learning curve is fairly short. One new feature that I really like is called Drag-to-Disk. After you install CD Creator, you will see what looks like a small CD player on your desktop. Just drag the files that you want to copy onto this large resizable icon and the copying process will begin. It’s great for creating quick back ups.
With all the confusion over the many DVD formats that are currently available, Roxio has covered all the basics. It supports all the DVD formats currently available including DVD RAM. While Apple still has the best DVD creation software, Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 is one of the best programs I’ve seen for creating DVDs on a PC.
A few other nice features include the ability to create e-mail directly from the program and print multiple photos on a single page. Roxio has also included a Label Creator program so you can label your discs and jewel cases. Label Creator automatically inserts song and track information on labels. Pre-designed templates make creating the labels easy. For those new to CD & DVD burning, Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 comes with a good tutorial. And we should all applaud Roxio for including an excellent 390 page manual with the boxed version.
Initial gripes about this software came from folks who had version 5 of this software installed when installing version 6. Because this caused some instability, Roxio has now included an automatic scan of your hard drive upon installation. If you have version 5 installed, the program will uninstall it before proceeding with the installation of version 6. Also, upon initial release there was some incompatibility with certain hardware configurations. The folks at Roxio have assured me that all of these issues have been resolve with the Roxio updater which is included within Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 and will update the software automatically. The software installed smoothly on every computer I used in my testing.
Roxio really beefed up this program with the inclusion of Audio Central for music and PhotoSuite for photographs. These two programs let you do things like move audio tracks and edit photographs. While not comparable to high-end audio and photo software, these programs will be just what the average user needs for working with audio and photo files.
This version of Easy CD & DVD Creator has also improved on the burning technology, eliminating many of the problems that caused bad disks to be created. They now provide flexible controls for the drive buffer. While this will mean nothing to most, knowledgeable users will now be able to start and stop the data transfer process without ruining the disk.
You will need Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, or XP and a fairly powerful computer to use this program. System requirements require an Intel® Pentium 200-MHz or faster processor for audio; Intel Pentium III 500-MHz or faster for video authoring; Intel Pentium III 800MHz or faster required for analog MPEG capture and 1.6 GHz for real-time capture from DV.
