Creator 9 finds Roxio in its most assured form for some time. It's been a constant and usually fair criticism that since the company switched to a suite of burning applications a few generations back, more often than not it has delivered a collection of fairly disparate tools, glued together by a central menu without a great deal of conviction.

Version 9, though, finds the developers genuinely in their stride, and it starts from the moment that aforementioned menu loads up. It simply feels a lot more human, explaining your choices briefly but succinctly, rather than just giving you an array of buttons to press.

It doesn't slow those who know exactly what they're looking for, yet it certainly helps the less experienced user who previously may not even have known half of things that Creator 9 can do, let alone how to access them.

And its list of tools is immense. Even if you factor in the slightly unfair collection of jack-of-all, master-of-none comments that the suite attracts, the sheer fact is that it offers over thirty different tools and applications, and only asks you for a little under £70 in exchange - much less if you shop around.

So let's take a look at what it can do. It was all born out of the Easy CD Creator package many years ago and, unsurprisingly, its disc-burning options are staggeringly comprehensive. There's support for the likes of DivX, OGG and AAC, it's all Blu-ray ready (with HD DVD support to be added a little further down the road), and there's the inclusion of more powerful options that allow you to ensure your content will fit on a given disc. It'll happily compress a dual layer DVD onto a single layer disc, for instance, copyright permitting.

On top of that, there's a selection of options to help you prepare the media for disc in the first place. The video editing application, Videowave, enjoyed quite a good life as a standalone product once upon a time (and still does), and with good reason. It won't give Studio 10 or Premiere Elements 3 too much trouble, but it's simple, it works and it gets results.

The fascinating Cinemagic tool is also included, which effectively edits your home movies for you, with surprisingly competence. And now the software can adapt your content for the likes of Sony's PSP, mobile phones and iPods too.

On the audio side the features are also exhaustive, with some terrific options at your fingertips. For instance, while on the one hand you can easily put together a music CD from a variety of different formats, there are good audio editing options that are straightforward to use, and cleaning up audio tracks is a doddle.

It's similarly easy to change tags, and the program will help you bring in your audio from a good variety of sources. There's a new Internet radio recording feature too, which allows you to quickly hit 'record' to save something you like the sound of. And it also caches a good few seconds at a time, meaning you'll also get ten to fifteen seconds' worth of content from before you hit the 'record' button.

Exhaustive is an overused term, granted, but it's really relevant here. We've only touched on a handful of the features available within the box, with the plentiful backup, image editing and playback functions not even getting a sniff.

On the downside? We're still slightly fonder of Nero when it comes to the core burning applications, and Creator 9 does have moments where it's a little system resource-hungry. But these are minor complaints set against a far more significant number of pros in the positive column. What's more, it genuinely feels like a tuned suite of utilities this time, with enough to completely satisfy the overwhelming majority of PC users. A terrific pack.

Comprehensive, yet backed up with quality, Creator 9 finds Roxio on excellent form, and the package really gels properly for perhaps the first time.