RSSRoxio Drops Software, Becomes Napster
By Nate Mook | Published August 10, 2004, 11:11 AM
Roxio has announced intentions to sell off its software division and focus its efforts entirely on the company's Napster music service.
Rival Sonic Solutions will take ownership of Roxio's consumer lines, which include the once market-leading Easy CD Creator, for $80 million. To complete the identity change, Roxio will change its name to Napster.
Roxio purchased Napster almost two years ago, and subsequently re-launched the infamous brand as a paid online music service. While Apple's iTunes pushes individual song for sale, Roxio has focused primarily on monthly subscriptions to its Napster music library.
"With the news today, we are on a path to become a very well-funded pure play in one of the hottest sectors in the consumer technology market," said CEO Chris Gorog.
But Napster has a long battle ahead, with Apple's iTunes Music Store firmly establishing itself as the market leader. Apple recently announced the sale of the 100th million song from iTunes, as well as the next generation iPod with improved battery life.
Napster is also looking to push its service via portable hardware music players; the company sells Napster-branded MP3 players to partners such as Samsung.
Napster CEO Gorog said the company is additionally beta testing a new version of Napster that utilizes Microsoft's "Janus" digital rights management technology. As first reported by BetaNews, Janus allows rights protected songs to be distributed to customers through a subscription model such as Napster's, and subsequently copied to portable devices, whereupon they will expire as a specified date.
Sonic software came with my Dell. I removed the Sonic software and installed the Roxio software. Easy CD Creator is much more superior and I like it better than Nero too. I pray that Sonic Solutions keeps this software up to date and does not take away any of the features.
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|I too enjoy the Roxio suites for their simplicity. However, with Sonic taking Roxio over I will surely count on Nero from now on.
In closing I give Roxio now Napster a big Middle Finger Salute!
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|It sound's like ahead's (Nero's) market share just jumped. Glad I like Nero better anyway.
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|Woah biiiiig mistake and veeeeery short sighted.
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|Well, this spells the defenite end of that sofware line. 6 was bad, 7 was even worse. now they sell it off to a company whose software is even worse ...
1) there sofware runs like crap,
2) have to pay 50bux for a software update that should be free.
sorry ... that means crap in my book
Sorry for the rant. Glad I swichted over to nero long ago
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|Actually, easy cd creator is probably one of the most successful cd writing software programs available, but not from roxio. Adaptec created it and since version 5.0, roxio has had it. Since then it has been unable to keep up with its competetors. All in all, roxio was still pretty good software. I pray that Sonic will keep EZCD creater alive, rather than 'integrate' features with the rather unpopular and cumbersome RecordNow. If sonic can integrate its great features into ezcd creators interface, it could leap forward again. I'm sure many will disagree--and yes, I use Nero as well.
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|After years and at least 4 full version changes of Adaptec/Roxio I have never been happy with their software, in fact, neither has Windows XP.
Roxio 5, 6 and 7 all crashed my Explorer more times then I care to remember.
I switched to Sonic for another hundred or so bucks and have never looked back.
I love Sonic and hope that they KILL off every piece of Roxio and keep adding featurs and functionality to the Sonic line of products.
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|Well I know 4.x was unsupported on XP, but 5.x and 6.x each had various updates... I don't suppose you bothered trying those, did you?
Anyway, I do agree that versions 5.x and 6.x were pretty decent. I still use 6.x although on the "Creator Classic" portion. The rest of it I don't even bother to install.
I have seen 7.0, and I can say for certain that as long as 6.0 works, I will NOT be updating to it. I don't think I'll be updating on account of Sonic's sake either.
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|I used Roxio 4 on Win98, then tried to get 5 (with updates) to work on XP; it never did, so I switched to Nero, which has yet to fail me.
If this is the end of that product, I say good riddance; it was already long dead to me.
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|I actually liked version 3 the best; very fast and it did what I needed. Of course that won't even begin to work properly in XP so I bought 5.0 and as luck would have it I never had a single problem with it. I'm still using it actually and as long as it works I see no reason to "upgrade". Note if you got the original 5 release you MUST update to 5.3 or later and do not reboot your computer until you do, even if it begs you to.
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|I purchased version 5 when Windows XP came out. Even after their XP compatibility patch I continued having issues. I ended up selling it on eBay and switched to Nero. Nero has never failed me. Perhaps Roxio has improved in later versions, but I'll be sticking with Nero. It's funny how one (major) slip-up can change a person's view of a product for good.
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|Hello? WINDOWS XP USES ROXIO'S SOFTWARE FOR IT'S CD BURNING SUPPORT!!! Ever seen directcd.exe that runs with ezcd maker? That is now a part of Windows XP. The REASON Roxio has so many issues on XP is that if you ever even attempted to install 4.x on xp, you're screwed until you reinstall Windows. This is because 4.x rewrites over XP's settings for writing CD's and screws up XP and Roxio (nero uses a completely different mechanism for burning, hence no problems there but chances are your PC is messed up).
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