I just received the March 1 issue of Time Magazine, where Anita Hamilton reviewed Easy Media Creator 7 from Roxio. Roxio launched Easy Media Creator 7 at Demo 2004 in Scottsdale on February 17, and it's already available.

Easy Media Creator 7 takes the "suite approach" to organizing photos, music, and video on a PC in a way that reminds me of Apple iLife '04 for the Macintosh. As such, Easy Media Creator 7 may have an impact on the competitive marketplace for digital music. Roxio owns Napster which has been re-positioned as a competitor to the iTunes Music Store. Apple uses the iTunes software that ships with the iPod to drive traffic to the iTunes Music Store. But, since Apple has not yet ported the other components of iLife '04 to the PC, they cannot offer the entire digital media management suite on the PC, the way that Roxio can.

Will this situation close the marketshare gap between iTunes Music Store and Napster? Probably not, because I think the iPod and iPod mini are still better digital music players than anything that supports Napster. But, a few digital media junkies who have not already bought an iPod may be swayed to a Napster-compatible player by the depth of integration offered by Easy Media Creator 7.

Surprisingly, Roxio has also chosen to integrate data backup into this product suite. When I first saw this feature, I thought that they included data backup in order to justify the ability to make archival copies of commercial DVDs (the feature that has gotten 321 Studios in trouble over DVD X Copy). But, Roxio's product information clearly states that Disc Copier cannot be used to copy copy-protected CDs and DVDs. It's a good idea to include generalized data backup tools in a suite like this, both because the rest of the product is so data-centric and because so few customers take the proper steps to safeguard one-of-a-kind data that they create on their PCs.

Roxio's website pointed me to a review of Easy Media Creator 7 published by PC Magazine. This review is a good resource for people who read the Anita Hamilton's article in Time Magazine and want more specifics.

I think Easy Media Creator 7 is a really compelling bundle of features that Roxio has integrated very well. It compares very favorably with the Apple iLife suite prior to the introduction of GarageBand. The price of Easy Media Creator 7 at major resellers, including Amazon.com is also very competitive. Digital media users with PCs really ought to consider picking up a copy of it.