Online Backup Guide

Roxio Media Creator 2009

Roxio Media Creator 2009 is Roxio’s brand new offering at the altar of CD/DVD burn software. Following closely on the heels of its predecessors, it implements online sharing of videos and photographs and offers a host of other tried and tested functions—some paid and some free.  After a lengthy installation process that lasts a full half hour, users are able to see that the interface is much more user friendly and icon based, but functionalities are much the same.  The selling point too, remains the same–a sheer breadth of capabilities for £50. The application offers a comprehensive package for disc burning, basic photo editing and manipulation, music ripping, copying and transcoding, video editing and authoring - as well as a basic backup tool. The difference is that they all seamlessly launch from the home window.

New Features of Roxio Creator 2009

What most users of Roxio Creator 2009 are anxious to see is stability and user experience indicates that it is so. Once the application is correctly installed, it works as it should.  All the features of the earlier version are retained and new features have been added to improve user experience.

HD Edit and Burn, AVCHD Support

The most exciting feature of Roxio Creator 2009 is the ability to edit and write High Definition Video to Discs and direct to Blu-ray discs for an additional payment.  The HD Camcoders receive full AVCHD
Support.  While editing, authoring and transcoding are standard, the Blu-ray disc and the facility for authoring 40 minutes of AVCHD material to a standard Single layer DVD disc is unique.

CineMagic and VideoWave

Roxio 2009 still sees value in CineMagic and VideoWave features of the earlier versions and has retained them for editing procedures.

Drag, Drop and Convert feature

User will find that the drag, drop and convert feature of the new version of Roxio Creator is very neat. It helps users drag and drop folders of music, video and photos into a single repository and do a batch convert into suitable formats for portable media players.  The media becomes more portable friendly.

Roxio Media Creator CineMagic Movie

Audio functions

Audio buffs will find Roxio 2009 an improvement over its predecessor. The Music-Audio tab provides access to a wide range of tasks.

• Transcoding and ripping of CDs to multiple formats is made possible.
• The sound editor is a notable addition to this suite.
  
• Recordings from streaming stations can be exported by marking the beginning and the end points to create multiple tracks.
• The Beatmatch function is designed to seamlessly blend from one track to another. However, this feature requires the user to supply it with tracks punctuated by a regular 4/4 beat, such as techno or house, else it tends to make a mess. It is however, no patch to Ableton Live, nor a human DJ for that matter.
• The Automix function leaves much to be desired. It automatically creates a tracklist form the music library, but is not very efficient in locating matching tracks.

Stability of audio cleaning function

The audio cleaning function that comes with My DVD is also very useful in getting rid of ground loops. Unlike the earlier versions of this tool, it seems more stable and allows users clean audio without crashing the system.

Roxio Media Creator Video Conversion

Other notable feautres

Other notable features of this application are the Video Copy and Convert program that converts files into batch files for use on mobile devices using encoding; the Roxio Medial Manager which allows synchronization of digital media from the PC to mobile or to send photos using the Email Assistant to convert them into HTML. Also, significant, is the program for importing video and photos for editing, enhancing and burning and the Photosuite for adding value to photo manipulation.

Backup

Backup and restore features for files allows backup of files and folders from any kind of digital media.

Additional Features in Roxio 2009 Ultimate

The Roxio 2009 Ultimate comes with additional features such as SmartSound SonicFire and SoundSoap which are advanced tools for creating sophisticated music tracks in Video and for cleaning up audio files.
SmartSound SonicFire Pro lets you easily orchestrate sophisticated music tracks like a professional and create the perfect sound track for your video productions. SonicFire Pro is the first-ever music solution with “Mood Mapping”. Users have the option to select from 1700+ music tracks and adjust the mix and feel of the music to perfectly suit your videos and slideshows. BIAS SoundSoap is an audio and video cleanup tool that helps remove noise from audio and video. It dramatically removes all types of unwanted noise from almost any audio, music or video soundtrack and uses intelligent algorithms to provide fast sound
restoration.

The Verdict

The bottom line from the user perspective is that the application is stable and is suite that is worth the value paid. It enables online and mobile sharing of Video, photos and audio in mobile devices and online.