Toast 7 Titanium

review by Derek Meier

Very few Mac users have not heard of Toast, since it’s the most popular CD/DVD recording software available for the Mac. Even with very little competition, Roxio does an awesome job keeping up-to-date and full-featured even with Mac OS X’s built-in burning features.  Toast 7 Titanium is no exception with a slew of new features. I will cover some of what I deem important additions.

Interface - Toast 7 features integration with the great iLife suite easily access iTunes, IPhoto and iMove from within Toast.

Video - In the area of video Toast features DivX support. You can now burn onto DVDs the popular DivX HD format (see www.divx.com) or you can convert DivX to DVD to watch downloadable content from the Internet. I unfortunately do no own a DVD player that also plays DivX, so I tested the conversion from Divzx to DVD format.

This is great addition to Toast’s features. The conversion does take time, but you can just set it and forget it. Of course you can do this with other third party software before, but Toast makes it very simple.

I downloaded Revelations, a Star Wars fan film that I was interested in watching, but I do not like to watch movies on the computer screen. The quality was very, very good. No real noticeable difference or loss in the conversion.

Now also in the video category, Toast 7 has included the features of Popcorn for making backups of unprotected DVDs. It allows you to back a 9GB dual-layer DVD to standard 4.7GB DVDs with little or no noticeable loss of quality. The compression does take a bit of time. It’s great for backing up home movies or non-commercial DVD’s. Buying Popcorn separately will cost you $50 if you purchase just Popcorn.

Also included in the category of Video, which I could not test was the ability to burn a HD DVD disk unfortunately I do not have the hardware to support HD.

Data - One of the cooler new features of Toast 7 is the ability to backup data using disk spanning. When you need to backup data that won’t fit on a single CD or DVD, you can now use disk spanning to “span” the data across many pieces of media. Testing this feature seems to work as advertised. Backing up my data across two DVD-R and restoring them worked fine with the restore utility Toast adds to each backup. This provides a good backup solution for the home and business user with backups made easily.

Audio - With your music collection growing and growing, it’s hard to achieve the perfect mix CD when your music exceeds the maximum size of the CD. Enter the Music DVD. Now you can create menus, album art and the shuffle with 4.7GB of music and play them on your DVD player for about 50 hours. This is a great feature for parties or just listening to a large amount of music. The Music DVD we created worked in 2 out of the 3 DVD’s we tested.  The one it did not play it was an off brand and it could not read the DVD. It’s too bad you cant play them in your car.

Images - With Toast you can create HD photo slideshows with background music and special effects. As easy to use as iMovie it allows you to create beautiful quality slideshow. Nice enough to give to friends and family.

Conclusion

If you are a current Toast 6 user, I would strongly encourage you to upgrade to this version. Its host of new features make the upgrade more than worthwhile, as well as still being easy user-friendly software. For new users who need more than the basic burning features that OS X or iLife provides, Toast 7 should fit your needs as well. Although IMHO I do think that most CD burning software both on the Windows side as well as Mac are a bit overpriced at $100, but the features modern CD/DVD burning software provides today are starting to sway my opinion.

Unfortunately for current users, Roxio only offers a $20 rebate and not more. My most welcome addition is burning DivX to DVD. There is a lot of worthwhile content on the Internet in DivX format that I would like to get put on DVD and Roxio has made it an effortless process. And maybe, just maybe, the new disk spanning will encourage us to keep up with backups, which I know most people are not good at keeping up with.