Managing Digital Media 

Analogue has had its day and we should all be concentrating on Digital or so we are told. However what is going to happen with all the non-digital content we have spent years collecting. Roxio believes it has the answer with its Creator 7 title. This product offers capture, organisational, edit and creation facilities to help with the preservation of personal media.

Creator 7, requiring either Windows XP (Service Pack 1 or later) or Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4 or later), is described as a digital media suite. Checking through its capabilities makes it extremely hard to argue with this description especially when you realise that there are 13 different components with this suite. This abundance of components probably goes some way towards explaining the rather long installation procedure as the various files are copied to the hard disk from the CD. As well as the program files, there is a second CD containing themes, templates and a range of sample media files. The content of this second CD can be copied to the hard disk or accessed, when needed, from the CD.

Access to the various components is from a front end menu that acts as your Home base. This can be customised to show all the different sections or just those that you use on a regular basis. Home divides its functionality into Tasks categorised under headings listed as Music, Data, Photo, Video and DVD. When selected a particular task will take you to the relevant section of the appropriate application. So, for example, “Create new Audio CD” will open Creator Classic at the correct section without the need for ploughing through the menu structure while “Copy data disc” will fire up the Disc Copier application to carry out the task.

Home will also provide direct access to each of the applications and tools that make up Creator 7. Along with the previously mentioned applications, you also get PhotoSuite, DVD Builder and VideoWave. Additionally a Drag-to-Disc feature allows you to drag files onto an on-screen icon for copying to a CD or DVD. Also listed with the main applications is Napster. This is not the original peer-to-peer service but now a legal site for purchasing and downloading music.

Roxio has bundled several tools with this media suite. As with the other components, these tools can be accessed from the Home menu. Among the features available are those allowing you to manage your media; capture files from other devices; create personalised labels; edit and record sound clips; and view media content using a player.

Taking the all-you’ll-ever-need approach can have both advantages and disadvantages. While you will have all the tools you should need within a single menu-based system, not all the applications will be best of breed and some you might not even want. This is certainly true of Creator 7. However when you considered that Creator 7 should be available for under £50 then it could well be the bargain that you can not ignore.

Link : http://www.roxio.com/en/products/ecdc/index.jhtml