Roxio Creator 2009

Roxio Creator has been our Editors' Choice media creation suite the past few years (under the name Easy Media Creator). It includes a wealth of tools for mixing, authoring, and burning videos and music. But most of its functions, aside from the Blu-ray, AVCHD, and disc-image burning and encoding, can be accomplished with tools built into operating systems or with free tools. Roxio adds plenty of frills, such as more video, photo, and audio special effects, and it's undeniably convenient to have all your media tools accessible from the same place. But whether it's worth paying Easy Media Creator's $99.99 price (list) for all these extra features and convenience is increasingly open to debate. What's not in doubt is that this year's entry from Roxio was disappointingly buggy and noticeably slower than the competition (that is, Nero 9) at performing key tasks.(www.pcmag.com)