Roxio Creativity Applications

Rather than expecting you to know what to do with your digital photos, PhotoSuite 5 groups its tools into the main steps of capturing images, editing them, outputting photos and organising them into albums. In each of these sections you get the tools you'd expect, presented simply but with some powerful options. The red eye remover and scratch fixer are simple to use but they fix the problems without distorting the colours in the rest of the image. If you're working with several photos that you took at the same time, they tend to have similar problems: multiple photo enhance lets you apply the same changes and effects to several photos at once.

You can add effects too, such as text or fancy edges, or create calendars, cards and poster. Layers show up as a gallery of objects down the side of the screen so it's obvious what you're working with. And while the photo stitching tool doesn't let you adjust as many features as some packages, it makes the task simple and produces good results. All the tools are grouped into buttons on screen, with the choice of seeing all the options or just the most common; you hardly ever need the menus so you can easily find all the features.

As well as printing images in a variety of arrangements you can upload them to Roxio's free online photo centre; create a slideshow to save or e-mail; or save them onto Video CDs that you can view in a standard DVD player. (You get a copy of the Label Creator software from Easy CD Creator to make labels and it automatically detects the names of your files and albums.) If you're keeping a lot of photos on your PC, you can organise them into albums and when you archive an album off to CD to make more space on your disk, you can still see the thumbnails and search for photos that are safely stored on CD.

This isn't the most sophisticated image editing software you can get, but it's certainly easy to use. PhotoSuite has the features you need to make the most of your photos and share them easily without getting overwhelmed by technical options. --Mary Branscombe

Before you start burning discs, you can organise and edit images using the cut-down version of PhotoSuite, or music in the AudioCentral media player. PhotoSuite has a friendly interface with all the tools you need for basic image editing such as removing red eye, correcting exposure and repairing scratches. You can organise images into albums, print multiple images in a variety of templates to make the most of expensive photo paper and make video CDs to look at your photos on TV. AudioCentral catalogues the music on your PC: it also rips CDs to MP3 (or the unusual Ogg Vorbis format) and looks up track names automatically. You can clean up problem audio by removing noise, create playlists, watch colourful visualisations and burn songs directly to CD.

The classic CD burning functions are (logically enough) in the Creator Classic tool, where you can drag files from the Explorer window into the disk menu to build your disc. You can choose different types of disc here directly (data, audio CD, MP3 and enhanced CDs). Projects can now span multiple CDs and DVDs and automatically include the Roxio Retrieve utility for opening individual files from a multi-disc project on any PC. Filtering files in or out by name or file type makes it easy to back up documents without wasting space on temporary files. The Label Creator automatically picks up the details of tracks in your project; you get a good range of templates, including Mini Disc and DVD cases, and some colourful themes too.

If you just want to copy a disc, the Disc Copier has a clearer interface than previous versions and it now handles raw mode copies, so you can backup almost any format of disc. You can also burn files just by dragging them to the Drag-to-Disc icon on your desktop: this is very similar to Direct CD but supports more disc types, including all the varieties of DVD, giving you what's effectively an enormous floppy disk.

All the options for video discs (DVD and video CD) are in the DVD Builder tool: this isn't the most sophisticated DVD authoring tool and the menu tools are on the simple side but it's easy to use. You can add video clips and still images from your hard drive or capture from a camera, extract stills from video, add transitions between clips and pick a theme for your menu. If you're using DVD+R/W, the software lets you capture straight from the camera onto a DVD without filling up your hard drive.

The various tools all strike a balance between including powerful features and being easy to use. You need a fairly powerful system for the video capturing options, but whatever you want to do with CDs and DVDs, you should be able to do it in Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator. --Mary Branscombe

Toast Titanium’s design is reminiscent of a funky 1950s diner jukebox. The window is resizable, with simple buttons specifying the type of CD you wish to burn. Pop a blank CD-R into your drive, drag your files into the window, hit that big red glowing record button in the corner, and you’re cooking. Toast supports all major CD formats including MP3, Mac/ISO hybrid, and VideoCD (playable on many DVD players).

If the above were all there was to this package, we’d be satisfied and ready for a nap. But included here are Jam, and Peak LE VST 3.0 (from Bias Inc.), for those who really want to tweak the data on their audio CDs, and Magic Mouse Discus, which lets you design great-looking labels.

Jam lets you create smoothly blended transitions between tracks with the cross-fade editor, and mark up to 49 index points within a track. The program supports 16 or 24-bit Sound Designer II, AIFF, WAV, or MP3 files, making it extremely versatile. When you’re finished tweaking, Jam creates a disk image for Toast to burn.

Although it is easy and convenient to burn files directly from Toast, you will have more control over audio files if you work first from Jam and then export the disk image to Toast. Even if you don’t plan on creating any cross-fades or index points, you can still listen to your entire disc and make volume adjustments, as Jam gives direct control over the final gain for each track. This feature is very flexible. Clicking on the gain amount in the track detail brings up a slider which lets you boost up to plus12db, or lower to -96db. You can also adjust left and right channels independently of each other.

Peak LE VST 3.0 is a trimmed-down version of the Peak software by Bias, Inc., and it’s a very cool and powerful tool. Peak is launched directly from Jam, or on its own, and supports a dizzying array of file types, including many not supported by Jam or Toast. These can, of course, be converted to a Toast-friendly type. Although some features in this light version are disabled, you still can manipulate your audio in a number of ways: change gain, normalise, and add DSP effects like Reverse and Invert. You can also create regions that Jam will import as tracks.

If you own a Mac and do a lot of CD burning, you want Toast with Jam. It’s an extremely good value, and it’s very fun to use. Best of all, taking full advantage of the features and extras in this package will lend your CDs a solidly professional quality. --John Bosch, Amazon.com

You get all the standard tools for creating CDs, with some useful extras. You can pick a directory and automatically filter out the files you don't want (such as temporary files and backups). If there are too many files Data OverSpan splits the project up into multiple CDs automatically and you can span multiple sessions too, so you can keep on adding files and get an index on each CD of the files in the set. And you can do the same with video, automatically splitting a long recording over several discs; it's ideal for backing up your footage before you settle down to edit it.

WinOnCD 6.0 can create MP3 files for you and it automatically creates albums of MP3s complete with an HTML menu and an M3U playlist; that makes a DVD of MP3s much more manageable. If your tracks aren't quite right, there's an eight-track audio editor that you can use to trim and tweak files or add special effects. If you're making a photo CD on Video CD to watch on your TV, the picture editor lets you trim and edit your images (and you can see exactly how they'll come out before you burn the disc). And you can build several layers of menus for navigating around DVDs and Video CDs.

The drag and drop interface is simple to use but if you want to delve a little deeper you can work with the track listings rather than the project editor. You don't need to start a separate program to create CD covers and labels either; the artwork editor is built right into the main window, along with a browser that lets you grab images and MP3 tracks from Web pages (assuming they're free for you to use).

WinOnCD 6.0 has a rather cutesy interface, with a wheel of different projects and odd curved corners on the main windows. The range of tools is broad ranging as well as comprehensive and you probably won't use all of them. But the end result is a slick and powerful package that lets you do just about anything you need with recordable discs, at a bargain price. --Mary Branscombe