Roxio’s Creator 9
Posted by Kathleen Maher on November 6th 2006 | Discuss
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$79.99
In this day and age of low-cost consumer video products, it can be pretty hard to make a buck. Roxio met the challenge by combining its formidable disk-creation software with video- and photo-editing and charging a premium for the suite compared to similar products. The ace in the hole for the com-pany was their CD/DVD-burning tools acquired with Adaptec. Well, time marches on—Sonic Solutions acquired Roxio and now the company has all kinds of expertise including DVD-making, video, audio expertise, and -backup.
An adequate review of Roxio’s new Creator 9 should probably take a few months and a few disasters to fully assess its features and backup capabilities. Over the years it seems that Roxio, a division of Sonic Solutions, has simply added stuff to the program. It sure doesn’t seem like anything has ever gone away. That means that some of the capa-bilities in this portmanteau of products are pretty venerable, and it means that the program can be a tad leisurely when you’re navigating through it.
The audio and the video of it
It’s the new features that are the best in this new collection of tools from Roxio, and some of them have become indispensable to me in no time.
For example, Roxio has added audio recording, and it’s a tool I use almost every day. I use it to record financial calls in the background so that I can then transfer them to my iPod and listen to them in the car. Likewise, radio shows can be recorded. The software can analyze tracks and break between songs. I find that knowing I have the tool means that I use it a lot more than I thought I would just reading about it. It’s the equivalent of a screen-capture tool for audio. If further editing is needed, Roxio has included a simple audio editor that is really a dream to figure out and to use.
I have been working on Podcasts lately and I have been switching between more sophisticated tools and the simple Roxio Sound Editor, and there are times when everything else is just too complicated. After all, all I want to do is trim an opening or clip out some noise. Within a few hours of fooling around with the Roxio’s Sound Editor I could edit files about as easily as I can type.
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Figure 2. Now, if you shot video that was in any way worth keeping and cutting together with sound, you can do it in Roxio’s Videowave module. In some cases, I’m lucky if I can salvage a five-minute clip to combine with music and stills in Cinemagic. The beauty part is that the end product still looks pretty good. |
The same is true for the new video-editing tool, Cinemagic. As it turns out I’m a fairly incompetent videographer. Luckily, I can take the few usable minutes I get from a day of video shooting, combine them with photos and music, and there is something to show for all my hard work. The software even analyzes the video and breaks it down into scenes that can be rearranged and deleted. It’s a lot easier than going into the video editor and trimming files. If you have used Muvee, a similar program, I’d say don’t switch. Muvee has a rock-and-roll heart. That said, the video editor, Creator 9, has backup tools to support Cinemagic. Videowave is handy and it can be used to fine-tune the work of Cinemagic so you can further pare out the weak video or punch up the -cadence.
It’s kind of handy that I have Crea-tor 9 at the same time I got the Crea-tive media player, because I have been experimenting with making files for the player. It’s gone pretty easily all in all. I can create an AVI file and send it directly to the Creative player. However, so far it seems all I can create are AVI files. When I try to make MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 or DiVx it still saves to an AVI file. As of this writing I haven’t tried to circumvent the software by going out to Videowave, and I’m not totally sure I’m not missing something. So, I’ll just fall back on the complaint that it should be more obvious. That’s not too much to ask in consumer software.
Nevertheless, the real strengths of Roxio’s Creator lie in its kindness to the incompetent and the busy. Usable media files can be created almost immediately using Creator’s bag of tricks. The lost art of making a party tape is back with the program’s easy CD/DVD disk creation.
In fact, some of those venerable capa-bilities are pretty hard to improve on. Creating data disks, audio disks, or backup disks is as easy as using Windows Explorer. It’s not pretty, but just about anyone can figure it out.
Backups, too
Roxio Creator 9 also helped me improve my lifestyle. I’m backing up more often. I hope that backup software is something that you never have to use. I never have. Not that I don’t back up my drives, but somehow only the drives that I have not backed up crash. Still, ever hopeful, I have used Creator 9 to back up my current system and at least I feel more secure. Perhaps my drive won’t crash now because I did backup.
Roxio’s backup capabilities aren’t blindingly fast, but compression ratios are over 200:1 and the background operation is painless and allows incremental backups once you’ve done your good work. We’d like to see tools for transferring information between computers so that moving from one computer to a new computer does not mean reloading all the software. These days there are so many things that require setup, it’s an incredible pain to get a new computer. It’s kind of hard to complain about things that Roxio has left out, however, because there is so much that is in.
Some people will use the media crea-tion capabilities, others the disk writing, and still others backup. There will be lots of people who can find a use for just about every module but you have to find them first. As I say, I’m still looking.
Creator 9 is absolutely perfect for notebooks or in situations where hard drive space is a consideration. You can easily get away with having Creator 9 on your computer and little else. You won’t need additional audio, imaging, or video applications. And you can backup between systems and write to DVD or CD. I’m not saying that Crea-tor 9 with all its capabilities is a small package; at 551 MBytes on the drive, it takes up some hard drive real estate but it’s considerably more miserly than similar suites and it has more capabilities including Sonic’s much-vaunted DVD capabilities and Roxio’s inherent knack for optical disks.
I have a minor beef with the product’s activation process—it seems like it wants to activate every module I use so it feels like a very long breaking-in -period. I have gone through the process of activating several times and sometimes it hangs when it goes online. Again, is it my system? Creator 9? I have no idea but it would seem simple enough to enable activation just once for all the features.
There are hiccups in Creator 9. As far as I know there is no
suite of consumer media creation products that does not have its
idiosyncrasies. But, after a few short weeks, Creator 9 has a few features that
I will not do without. 
