I killed some software last night

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It was Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator 6. I had been using if for a little over a year, and it was the buggiest program I ever used, not to mention one of the most expensive.

 

My computer came with Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4. It was an excellent program, very easy to use, reliable and stable. Adaptec became Roxio somewhere around version 5, and I got version 6 because I needed its new video making capabilities for a wedding video project.

 

For making videos, version 6 was a bust. The DVD maker had a bug in the audio video synchronization which made it impossible to see beforehand how the finished product would look and sound. A downloadable upgrade, which was supposed to fix the bugs, rendered the entire thing useless, by preventing video burning entirely! Technical support was nonexistent. They told me to uninstall the whole thing, and reinstall it without the patches, which of course put me right back with the problems I started with. I ended up buying a different video program altogether, which worked fine for half the price.

 

The CD burner in version 6 worked well enough for making data CD backups, and the sound editor was kinda nice. But when it came to making music CDs the program was a dismal failure. It had a nearly identical interface as version 4, but it worked very differently. For starters, whenever I loaded a commercial CD to grab a few tracks, the program raised a fuss because it couldn’t access the internet to search a massive database in order to tell me what CD I had just inserted. Dammit! I know what CD I just inserted! Just let me USE it!

 

Once I wrestled together a custom CD, it would usually abort halfway through the burn, ruining the CD. Two nights ago I spent two hours and never did get what I wanted.

 

Last night, I tried again, and error messages kept popping up. I’d had enough. I uninstalled Roxio’s version 6, and reinstalled Adaptec’s version 4. I then made the CD I wanted in a short time, with only one glitch: it wouldn’t recognize one WMA music file I wanted to include. Otherwise it was perfect, the first time.

 

If anyone from Roxio is reading, let it be known I will never buy another Roxio product, and I would encourage others to avoid it as well.

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