An Honest Review of two Roxio Creator Products

It is time for me to do a review on this blog. I will review Roxio Creator 2009 (regular edition) and Roxio Creator 2010 Plus version. Creator 2010 Plus edition is selling for approximately $70 at Fred Meyer, Walmart, and probably other retailers. But price information should not be confused with telling people to go out and buy it so read on.

These products seem to work as advertised but not without some crashing of the programs.

That is the shortest review in history you are probably thinking right now.

Well the ordinary review about whether the products simply works or not is not the kind of review that I want to do. So read on because I am going to give an "honest review" of these products unlike your typical computer magazine.

First off Roxio has multiple versions of Creator 2009 and 2010. If that weren't confusing enough, they created a Creator 2010 Plus edition recently that I just bought as an "upgrade" to Creator 2009 regular edition that I bought earlier this year.

But if you look at Roxio's website, there is virtually no mention of a Creator 2010 Plus edition. Since I didn't find any good source of information about this Plus edition of Creator 2010, I made the decision to buy it and try it out which means you can't return it once you open it so you are stuck with a $70 program whether it works or not.

Note: From now on I will refer to Creator 2009 as 2009 and Creator 2010 Plus as simply Plus to reduce the typing.

I opened up Plus and it had just a small getting started type book included in it. Which makes sense because it comes in a DVD Case unlike the 2009 version which had a 200+ page manual. After installing Plus (I left 2009 on the computer for comparison purposes) and running Plus, it appears Plus is virtually the same as the 2009 edition which is a shame for me because I had spent $70 on it.

When I had to e-mail Roxio what the Plus Version is for in comparison to Creator 2010 standard and Pro editions, the Roxio people took a few hours to respond and could only tell me that it was the same as the other 2 editions of their Creator 2010 program which I knew that wasn't true because Pro has extra programs and a Blu-Ray Plug in included which the standard and Plus doesn't include.

So in conclusion let me list off all of the negatives about Creator 2010 Plus.

Poor Support from Roxio: If these people are that unaware of the differences of their products and what they are selling that should be a big red flag.

Poor Docs from Roxio: Yes, it is true that they have videos you can watch to learn how to use features of Creator 2010, but they falsely advertise that it is built-in to 2010 when in fact this features requires an Internet connection. The irony is on these videos is that you learn how to do stuff in 2009 that was poorly documented or completely ignored by Roxio in the 2009 manual and packaging. But why should you have to buy a 2010 version to see these videos when they provide some of them free on their website? Again they sort of forget to let you know about these videos if you already own 2009 so maybe you will get suckered into buying 2010.

No New Really Useful Features: Other than the videos which you could have watched online for free by looking for and clicking on their constant ads for 2010, there is really nothing that makes 2010 Plus worth buying if you already have 2009 version of Creator.

Finally a lack of Blu-Ray Support: Creator 2010 and 2010 Plus editions have no support for Blu-Ray until you buy a Plug-in thing online from Roxio. The more expensive Pro version has the Blu-Ray writing Plug-in but even Pro version doesn't have a Playback Plug-in for Blu-Ray so you still have to buy an extra thing online from Roxio. So there is NO complete version of Creator 2010 on the market.

The bottom line is that Creator 2010, Creator 2010 Plus, Creator 2010 Pro, etc. are not for owners of Creator 2009. Roxio should in good faith advertise this or have these products pulled from the shelves for making deceptive claims about their 2010 upgrades to 2009 product users.

Roxio's unawareness of their own programs, their lack of docs, their lack of blu-ray support, and their lack of new features for what should be a major upgrade in my opinion is a perfect example why software piracy exists.

Anyone think differently?