Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum [Old Version]

Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum is the most complete and powerful CD burning software! Now you can burn and share anything on your CD, your music, your photos, your videos even back up your critical data. Design your own CD labels and jewel cases. This platinum version is so complete it comes with Sound Stream 2, Take 2, Direct CD, CD Spin Doctor, CD Label Creator, MP3 support and much more. This includes the User manual and Getting Started Guide. Part Number 1874900.

Amazon.com Review
Admit it: After installing your first CD burner, you transferred every byte of audio and data on your hard drive to CD simply because it was so cool that you could. Whether you're an audio-CD burnaholic or simply perform the occasional hard-drive backup, Easy CD Creator 5 offers excellent options for getting the job done. This powerful program delivers an exhaustive collection of data transfer and formatting options behind a super-slick interface.

Pick just about any file format and this program provides an innovative way of storing it on CD. Burning an audio CD is a piece of cake for this tool, as is creating a video CD and picture slide shows, transferring audio from a cassette or phonograph to CD, and archiving a hard drive. A nifty CD label creator helps organize your archive as well.

As expected, audio CD burning options are comprehensive. In addition to CDA-formatted audio (playable in most CD players) a great feature converts MP3 tracks into CD audio (and vice versa) and pumps up the audio quality of MP3 files lost during compression before transferring the batch of tracks to disk. A sound-transition control allows you to fade songs out or in, add a gap between tracks, or crossfade songs (great for mixed CDs featuring live recordings). For those party-mix CDs culled from various sources, a normalizer function smoothes each track's volume levels across the CD.

Easy CD Creator 5 is much more than an audio-CD burner. A photo-sharing tool frames pictures into self-running slide-show presentations that can be backed with music. Videophiles will enjoy the video-CD capabilities. You can add any Quicktime, AVI, or series of still images to the layout interface, configure the layout, then burn the CD as an MPEG-1, viewable in compatible DVD players.

CD burning is a CPU-taxing endeavor that'll spit out flawed disks if the hardware isn't up to the task. Easy CD Creator 5 requires a 200 MHz CPU or faster, and the recommended 64 MB RAM should be doubled to avoid those annoying buffer-overrun error messages. But if your system is up to par, Easy CD Creator 5 should churn out CD after CD of beautifully formatted disks. --Eric Twelker

Amazon.com Product Description
Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum allows you to burn and share any type of data on CD. Create your own high-quality music CDs, create photo slide shows and video presentations, and archive all of your important files safely on CD.

You can create high-quality customized music CDs from any source, including music CDs, cassettes, and Internet downloads. Easy CD Creator automatically converts MP3 files to create CDs that can be played in home and car stereos. The MP3 encoder allows users to go the other way as well, and transfer CD tracks to MP3 files. And the MP3 CD music project allows users to create CDs with over 100 MP3 songs to play in a computer or on an MP3 CD player. SoundStream 2 is an MP3 enhancer that allows users to improve the sound quality of MP3 files. Gap-edit control allows users to set the amount of silence between tracks, and track-transition effects add fade-in, fade-out, and cross-fade effects between songs. The software fully supports Red Book Audio for musicians and audio enthusiasts. You can also record from analog sources (phonograph, tape, or microphone): sound filtering removes pops, clicks, and hisses, and adjustable silence detection and track-splitting allows for the recording of entire albums.

Easy CD Creator is also a solution for archiving and storing data. Protect your data from computer disasters; backup is achieved in three easy steps. The image-based backup allows system restoration and provides protection from crashes and viruses. There is support for automatic spanning across multiple CDs to backup large partitions. You can also create your own DVD movies: edit and save your videos to CDs that can be played on VideoCD players and many DVD players. Included is VideoImpression, an easy-to-use basic video editor with an MPEG-1 encoder that allows users to save their videos in a format that is compatible with Video CD Creator.