Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 8 is an ambitious piece of software as it attempts to be your resource for all kinds of digital media projects, including photos and videos, as well as more serious tasks such as backups.

Not only does it achieve this goal, but it is all the more remarkable for being easy to use without leaving more advanced users frustrated.

The Home application is the centre of Creator and the starting place for nearly every part of the suite. Redesigned from the previous version to be more logical, some simple tasks can be performed straight from the Home screen without having to load a separate application – a great time saver.

More wizards have been added to tasks that previously just launched the relevant application. Creating a photo slideshow can now take as little as 15 minutes using the templates for transitions, panning and zooming. It can even analyse the background music and match the transitions to the beat of the track.

The key to Creator’s appeal is its ability to produce impressive-looking projects with little user interaction. When the automated process has finished, be it a photo slideshow or video, you’re given the option to either edit the project or simply burn it to a CD or DVD.Organising and sharing digital media stored on your computer is another task handled by Creator 8.

The Organise application can be used to arrange media into albums or you can browse by date. Media on the computer can be shared using the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) standard via the My Mediaspace application. This is useful if you have a UPnP media streaming device on your network that can’t read basic folder shares.

Another sharing tool is the private peer-to-peer application called Liveshare, which lets you share photos over the web with friends and family. Although the computer storing the media must be left on so it can be accessed, Liveshare is a good solution to the problem of sending large images via email. Messages with thumbnails are automatically generated and sent to those people you want to see the photos.

If you’ve got a large amount of music to burn, Creator can help you create a DVD audio disc that can hold up to 50 hours of music. Copying music from LPs or cassettes is made much easier by using Musictags with the Gracenote CD database.

Rather than relying on track times as with CDs, the software creates a digital fingerprint using the first few seconds of the track to compare with the database. The results were not as reliable as with a CD, but this is still an improvement on entering track names by hand.

As expected, the video-editing application, Videowave, now supports the HD (High Definition) formats as found in some of the latest digital camcorders. It can also handle the popular DivX codec, which is great for reducing file sizes but maintaining quality.

Backup MyPC, introduced in Creator 7.5, has also been given an update. It now features an easy-to-use wizard interface with options such as incremental backups, compression and encryption. It cannot make an image of a hard disk but it can include or exclude files based on type.

We were impressed with the previous version of this package and, with Creator 8, Roxio has made a great product even better.

System requirements:
1.6GHz P4
256MB of Ram
1GB hard disk (9GB for DVD Video capture)
Windows XP