Roxio is very well known into the business of burning (saving) of data on optical drives for many years. Actually, if I remember correctly, the Creator Classic (from the Easy Media Creator Suite) was the first program I ever used to burn a CD. And so I was pretty curious and interested to find out what has changed in the meantime and what improvements have been brought to the application suite.

From the start I can say that the Complete Suite of applications has changed very little in concept – that is – having a full collection of programs that would help you bring the best results in your work. These range from the burning of CD/DVDs to photo handling and video capturing and editing. In the default start-up application interface you can see 8 categories presented as sections within the suite, each having a lot of software solutions for any task you might require or you would expect to find in such a rich application.

In the Audio section you will find Easy Audio CD which is meant to help you record and create Audio CDs.  You can also create MP3 Music Discs or Jukebox Discs. The Quick Music DVD will create music DVDs that are playable on any DVD and the Rip CDs or Multi CD Ripper applications will turn the music from your Audio CDs into digital music files.

The name says it all for the Edit Song Information program and you also must notice the Convert LPs and Tapes feature which can also be helped by the Sound Editor. The Batch Converter can transcode multiple audio files, one after another, from one format to the other, with extensive output options and advanced settings, while AutoMix generates playlists based on your selections and your mood.

In the Data and Back-up section you can create Data Discs or you can just use the Creator Classic for data handling and copying which includes compression and encryption (I will add some more details on the encryption method later on). With Roxio BackOnTrack you can save or restore your files, media and important data on another hard drive or CD/DVD disc.

The Copy section from the suite offers you the following options: you can Copy Disc, Copy DVD Movies, Create Disc Image or just Burn a CD/DVD Image to Disc. When compared to other utilities created by other companies dedicated to these purposes, Roxio presents to the user quite competitive products.

In Media and Devices you can handle the files from external storage units such as media cards, external hard drives, digital cameras, USB memory sticks. You can go even further in these in the Photo and Video sections. While the Photo suite contains a lot of software for handling and manipulating images, ranging from photo enhancing to creating slideshows, batch image processing and printing. The Video section is full of movie processing tools, such as capturing from devices, movie creation with custom soundtrack, movie DVD creation, and video file conversion (including a DivX DVD maker module).

The CinePlayer might not work on all computers and configurations – it sets itself as the default DVD player without asking for permission and I found that very annoying – it may be cool and ok for the average user, but irritating for the computer specialists who have their own settings and preferences when it comes to watching movies, DVDs. I haven’t tested it under XP (just on Vista Ultimate) but if it worked OK on Vista, it would probably work well in XP too.

The last section, Tools presents you with the options of creating disc labels, to gain some disc information, erase RW discs, finalize CD/DVDs and load disc images. The Disc gallery is pretty much digital library software that lets you keep a record of your discs and their content for faster access.

This tendency to bring it all together into one big package is quite wonderful but not always a good idea as the developers tend to literally throw in as many modules and applications into one big suite with the hope that they would create a huge fan user-base and will gain financially a lot from the monopolistic policy. The shallowness inevitably occurs at the level of quality of the many added features “on-the-go” – the image of the software dedicated to the amateur and inexperienced user is quite clear here but what I obviously dislike is that certain important features (like the relatively new CinePlayer) have been neglected. Yes, when you look at a program like that it makes you wonder – “is there anything that this program doesn’t know how to do?” – but does it really do everything according to today’s standards? Not really!

Applicability: As I said above – this software suite is capable of doing a lot of things, like saving data on CD/DVD, other hard drives, back-ups, video transcoding and multiplication, especially with the traditional features, like the Classic Creator – well, it is a classic indeed and does its job very well – it even adds protection to the CD/DVDs by securing them with password protected 128bit encryption so that you would be the only person who can have access to the respective discs.

Pro(s): A lot of the applications in the suite offer very good alternatives when compared to other “famous” solutions and t does include a wide variety of different types of file handlers. For about $99 you can get a nice package with a lot of advantages (you’re not wasting money on this at all – you get what you paid for) – it might be practical like I said for companies who wish to have many-in-one products without having to buy other individual ones. Also the newbies will be glad that the suite has built-in a very nice looking user-guide. You can even watch a visual demo here.

Con(s): I really dislike application set-ups (so anything besides drivers) that require a restart of the system in order to insert a bunch of useless programs into the start-up process which can seriously slow down the computer (I’m referring to modest configurations). Many of the names or the programs themselves are very similar and give a repetitive aspect. It’s a sad but true thing to say - I’m just not as pleased as I was with older versions: the CinePlayer is not reliable and the whole setup installs many other codecs that would seriously interfere with the ones you may already have on your computer – and so this renders the dependencies of the application as being based on the third party decoders which is very old as technology – Bad boy, Roxio, bad!

Official website

Buy Download: $99 (+$4 the extended download service)

There is no option for trial download of the reviewed version.