Test Bench:
Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 Disc Burning Software
It used to be that CD-burning applications burned CDs. And they still do, but each new version has more and more features until, finally, CD burning seems to be only one small aspect of the total package. Roxio's Easy CD & DVD Creator version 6 (Creator 6) is easily the most full featured disc-burning suite around. As you'd expect, we're going to approach this product from the perspective of the video-enthusiast.
Installing ROM
The minimum installation size for Creator 6 is 271MB, which is more than double what Nero 6 requires. The full package is around 815MB, about a quarter of which is DVD menu templates. Installation was easy, but required a reboot. We then were prompted to automatically install four minor updates (total of 4.27MB), which we did.
Basic EZCD
The basic program launcher is much simpler than Nero 6 and sports only five large, friendly buttons with no submenus. Although we don't really like the floating toolbar that never goes away, we were immediately copying and compiling discs without hesitation. Perhaps our only complaint about the main burning workspace is that the file explorer pops up outside of the main application, opening yet another window on our desktop.
We like the Drag-to-Disc module (the app formerly known as DirectCD) that will automatically record files to a recordable disc without any thought at all. As the name suggests, all you need to do is drag your files and drop them into the little app and you are done. Creator leaves the disc open, so you can basically use the disc like a floppy drive until it is full and then finalize it. Drag-to-Disc also works with rewritable formats.
Technical EZCD
We didn't discover any important technical limitations when using Creator 6, for example, the app had no trouble burning data from across our network.
One really cool feature for videographers was the ability to span large projects (and even single files) across multiple discs. To test this, we threw a 2.5GB video file (*.avi) into a CD-R project. Creator 6 automatically set the project up to span multiple discs. Creator 6 adds a special Windows executable (retrieve.exe) that will allow any Wintel computer to successfully extract the archive from the spanned discs. Simple, flawless and impressive.
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