Typically I am used to standard install processes when I buy software nowadays. They usually work right out of the box. That is not true however for Roxio VideoWave 7.
The product appears to be designed to be deployed inside of the Easy Media Creator 7 product. When you go to the Roxio support site, you can find references to Roxio VideoWave 7 under Easy Media Creator 7. You can also find patches to one of the errors I was getting under Easy Media Creator 7, but if you try to run the patch on the Videowave 7 standalone, it will not install, complaining that it cannot find Easy Media Creator 7.
I bought the VideoWave 7 because I already owned the Roxio Easy CD Creator 6, which is really all that the Easy Media Creator 7 product brought to the table. Easy CD Creator 6 is a pretty good piece of software, though they try to go beyond what a Windows XP UI specifies for title bar heights, fonts, etc. Easy Media Creator cost $99.99 at the time, and Videowave 7 standalone was $79.99. Later when I went back to the store, Easy Media Creator had dropped to $59.99, because maybe other people had the same issue with Videowave and wanted to switch.
I had several errors right off the bat when running this software.
1. When I ran Videowave professional home, and I clicked on any of the icons or the quad squares, the display goes blank, and I only see the structure, all of the icons disappear and so does most of the text. Why the heck do you need a homepage for a piece of software anyhow? Unnecessary considering the OS manages your access to applications well enough.
2. When I run Media Manager, I get an alert dialog with the error, R6025 - pure virtual function call.
3. When I ran Videowave, the production editor part of the window does not look like it is fully rendered correctly. There are two blank - empty labeled
buttons (you can tab to but clicking on these does no good.)
4. I saw several people with similar issues on the message boards, however whenever I would try to submit a response to a specific message, the server would redirect to a log in. After you log in, you have to navigate back to the message you were looking at. When you finally say reply to that message again, you must log in _again_. This was frustrating, I made sure cookies were allowed, and they were even added as a trusted site in IE. Tried again in Netscape 7.1. Same issue. Roxio ought to fix their website.
http://boards.support.roxio.com/roxio/board/message?board.id=712&message.id=942
http://boards.support.roxio.com/roxio/board/message?board.id=712&message.id=938
5. I emailed customer support at Roxio, twice. No human response in a week.
6. If you want to call Roxio's technical support, it costs $30 per hour, with no guarantee of a solution. There is no way I would even attempt that, seeing how their website was so bungled, you probably would spend that $30 navigating some horrendous voice menu system. And you are still not guaranteed a solution. I think that kind of product support is almost worse than SPAM-mail.
I called Best Buy's corporate office, and they reiterated their software return policy, which is that you must only return for an identical exchange. Obviously the software itself was flawed, not just my version, and so you would keep getting these errors (assuming that all of the CDs are the same burn.)
Fortunately Woodbury, MN Best Buy was cool. They let me return the software for credit.
I installed Sony Screenblast Movie Studio 3.0. This software rocks. This is what you would expect - an Adobe Premiere - like timeline interface. Works out of the box, beautifully. Made a 12-minute video of Trevor's baptism, combining, text, photos, movies, and music in only two evenings.