Nero’s latest media management software is lightweight, modular – and, for the basic package, free. But it really is basic. The Kwik Media front-end (a rebranded version of Nero MediaHub) looks like a cross between Windows Media Player and Windows Live Gallery, but it’s less versatile than either. The music browser is arranged around albums, rather than tracks, which makes creating playlists a pain. And the rating system is flatly binary – files are either “favorites” or they’re not.
In Kwik Media’s photo and video modules you do find a few features that go beyond the bare rudiments: these include basic photo enhancements, one-click uploading to online services and slideshows with music.
But the point of Kwik Media isn’t the features it comes with: it’s the ones you can add. Click on the Nero Store link and you’re taken not (as you might expect) to an iTunes-like media store, but to a list of purchasable plugins that give Kwik Media new capabilities.
The first hit, proverbially speaking, is free. The Kwik Burn plugin, which lets you burn music and data discs, is a free “purchase” – a clever incentive for new users to sign up to the store. There’s also a 99p Kwik Faces plugin that adds face recognition to the photo management module.
After this, the price goes up. The free package can import files from removable drives and players, but if you want to sync the other way you’ll need to shell out £5 for the Kwik Move it extension, which also includes transcoding abilities. To watch and burn video DVDs you’ll need to add the Kwik DVD extra, which costs another fiver.
Other plugins add extra video and audio codecs (£5), extra slideshow themes (£8) and Blu-ray playback (£30). There’s no audio or video editing module, no Blu-ray authoring and no backup module. But if you need those advanced features you can buy the full Multimedia Suite directly from the store, within Kwik Media.
In principle, the idea of paying only for features you require is appealing. And Kwik Media’s various components come mostly at pocket money prices. The trouble is, most of what they do can be achieved for free with other packages – in many cases, ones bundled with Windows. Effectively, you’re paying for little more than Nero’s simplistic integrated interface – a pretty poor deal, in our view.
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