Roxio Creator 2009
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 15th 2008 | Discuss
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Opening screen of Roxio Creator 2009.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
There are five companies that are offering multimedia suites: Adobe, Avid/Pinnacle, Corel/Ulead, CyberLink, and NTI. I suspect Microsoft will soon be an entry into this category, and there are some other brands that have bits and pieces.
Roxio has been in the business longer than most, and may actually be the pioneer. Their technology came from the Canadian company MGI, which was definitely a brave pioneer and suffered the usual fate of pioneers. They paved the way for everyone else. Roxio continued a trend that started at MGI of buying adjacent companies and trying to tie together all the programs, UIs, and file structures. And, being one of the oldest companies in the field, they have collected a huge customer base.
This is a customer base with opinions, and they are anxious to share them, so Roxio has gotten a lot of, ah, feedback. But the Roxio folks don’t see it as annoying or distracting, that’s a quality that differentiates them from the competition. They see it as helpful, the customers are telling them what they want to buy, and so Roxio tries to incorporate as many of the suggestions and fix as many complaints as possible. I can truly say the company is one of the most diligent in that respect of any I know.
The new Creator 2009 opening screen is typical of many suites with one exception—on the right-hand side is a mini user’s manual. Roxio and Corel are the leaders in trying to help the user wade through the zillions of functions and features. Many times, we’ve discussed the lexicon, of what you would call the various functions, with Corel. If the user doesn’t know that resize, for instance, means to reduce the pixel count in a photo, he or she may spend a lot of time just trying to find such a function.
As the screen indicates, there are five basic applications and each has a host of capabilities beneath them. You can edit videos (including transcoding), music (including background noise reduction, as well as pops, clicks, and wows), photos (a full-fledged photo editor), and utilities like rip and backup. You can also use it to make videos to upload to YouTube.
Photo editor
Opening screen of Roxio Creator 2009.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Opening screen of Roxio Creator 2009.
(Source: Jon Peddie Research)
I played with the photo editor. I took some very dark camera phone pictures, hit auto-fix, and zambo, I had a good, useful picture
Next, I tried a cutout. I wanted to take a picture of a monitor with a workstation on a white background, and cutout the monitor and have a transparent background.
Burn baby burn
Roxio claims their suite has the best burning and copying capability on the market. Not many companies can make such a claim, but Roxio/Sonic can. It truly is in their DNA. With this latest version of Creator, the company fills out the capability with data burning on CD, DVD, and Blu-ray, and offers data compression and encryption, as well as file backup.
Transcoding and more
You can use Creator to convert audiobook CDs to play as iPod audiobooks, with automatic chapter and bookmarks.
Sounds great
The audio enhancement and utilities are a marvel. You can sync beat for beat between songs for that DJ in you who wants to make party mixes and send your party mixes with cross fades and beatmatched transitions to portable devices. It also makes it easy to capture internet audio and automatically tag music files, and it has hiss, pop, and wow noise removal filters for converting your old LPs and tapes.
That feature is also fantastic for removing background noise from dictation tapes which enhances the voice-to-text accuracy in speech-recognition programs like Dragon’s (which BTW, has a new version—#10, which DOESN’T work on Vista 64, thank you very much.) However, Creator 2009 DOES work on Vista 64.
But wait, there’s more…
The other functions in the suite: secure online sharing for friends and family, PhotoShows and share online, on DVD, or on TV, and uploading of video and photos directly from Creator applications, are going to take time to evaluate so you’ll probably be hearing about this little wonder several times.
What do we think?
Sonic Creator 2009 is slick. It’s fast, well laid out, easy to understand and use, and remarkably affordable. The basic unit starts at $99. For $29.99 you can get a HD Blu-ray disc plugin (free till 30 Sept.), or you can get the Roxio Creator 2009 Ultimate for $129.
