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Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator 6: DVD Authoring Software Review

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.

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.

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.

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.

Obviously, the primary reason why you'd buy Easy CD & DVD Creator is to burn discs, and it does that well. You'll also notice that we've paired the review in this issue with our review of Nero 6, which is the main competitor for this product. But we were surprised to see that we almost could have compared Roxio's package to Apple's iLife suite. As Roxio marketing states, Creator 6 is a "Digital Media Suite" and combines digital audio library management and playback tools (iTunes), digital image organization and enhancement (iPhoto), video capture (iMovie) and DVD authoring (iDVD). While the Mac iLife suite is certainly the better package for these tasks overall, Roxio's app is certainly much better at disc burning than the Apple product. And it isn't too shabby in the other categories either.