Looking at what Easy Media Creator Suite 10 offers today, it’s hard to imagine the program started life as a simple CD-burning application.

Demonstrating a good understanding of how end users like to make the most of their CD/DVD-writing hardware, Roxio has once again gathered a great array of applications and utilities for a wide range of disc-burning and related tasks.

Easy Media Creator Suite 10 basically provides the wherewithal to import music, photos and video files onto a computer, edit them, and output the result to disc, online or onto a portable device.

Additionally, there are tools for tasks such as general disc copying, data backup, file management and format conversion.

All this is accessible via a single desktop shortcut, which launches Roxio Central; Easy Media Creator Suite’s one-stop shop for all your media needs. It looks quite different to Version 9’s equivalent, especially if you’ve switched to Vista in the interim.

Roxio’s frontend has been treated to a pretty Aero makeover; icons are smarter looking and the general layout is fairly pleasing. As it turns out, however, these changes are largely superficial. The left-hand task menu is almost identical, for instance, other than the fact the separate Data and Backup icons have been merged into a single ‘Data and Backup’ one.

The main pane of the Roxio Central window is a bit unusual. It’s a context-sensitive window that’s tied into the heavy online aspect of Easy Media Creator. For example, the default Home screen that you see when you launch Roxio Central displays a number of links, some of which will take you to genuinely useful how-tos and others which are little more than stealth advertising for other Roxio products and services.

Like Nero, some simple tasks - copying a CD or ripping some music, for example - can be carried out within the Roxio Central window itself. More involved jobs, such as DVD authoring or photo-editing, are performed within independent components, all of which can be launched from Roxio Central.

Also like Nero, Easy Media Creator 10 comes with a couple of Vista Sidebar gadgets - a drag-and-drop audio/video converter and an instant audio capture module - both of which are extremely useful.

Other new features include improved photo-editing and backup tools as well as an instant Youtube upload feature for digital video makers and compatibility with the latest high-definition disc formats. Just as with Nero, Easy Media Creator Suite 10 doesn’t necessarily feel like it has undergone a massive overhaul since the last version. In fact, Roxio has made lots of improvements - it’s just that many of them are relatively minor.

If you’re desperate to shrink down photos so they can be viewed on a mobile phone screen with no borders, for example, then you may be pleased to find that this is something Roxio’s suite can now do. Easy Media Creator’s attention to detail is impressive, but the truth is, with so much on offer, it’s unlikely you’ll ever use half of the features that have been made available.

In many ways it comes down to taste. If you prefer Nero’s no-nonsense take on things, then you probably won’t appreciate Roxio’s more corporate, hand-holding approach.

There’s no denying, however, that Easy Media Creator Suite 10 is a very useful, easy-to-use set of tools that can simplify many day-to-day media tasks - not to mention help you get your money’s worth out of your disc burner.