Macsimum review: Toast Titanium Pro still the best at what it does

Posted by Don Foy Mar 5, 2009 at 5:00am

Return with me to the days of beige, when RAM was measured in megabytes, every Mac came with a floppy drive and the largest hard drive you could buy was 1GB, and that one ran you more than $2,000.

Then came the writable CD. You could put 650MB on one of those. But you didn’t get one from Apple. There were numerous third-party CD writers on the market. And almost every one came with Toast. Usually it was the light version, fairly limited and sometimes keyed to the drive it came with. There were other disc-burning utilities, but Toast is the one that survived. It was the best.

Until Apple made it easy to just pop in a CD and burn it.

I hadn’t used Toast in many years, but when the opportunity came to review Roxio’s Toast 10 Titanium Pro, I jumped on it. I wanted to see if it was worth the extra money to do something my computer did right out of the box.

It is. What I expected was a CD burning program. What I got was a suite of programs that enhance your digital experience. And it does the basic stuff you expect of Toast.

First off, I support a couple of sites which still use Mac OS 9. And they usually can’t find disks to reinstall systems or run utilities. I have had major issues trying to burn a bootable OS 9 disk in OS X. Toast did it the first time. For me, that is priceless. Most everyone else won’t need that feature.

Probably the most useful basic feature of Toast is one-click duplication. Pop in a CD or DVD and with one click, duplicate it (we won’t address copyright issues here).

The software package that comes with Toast is outstanding. The Pro version comes with the ability to burn HD video and Blue-ray, if you have a compatible burner; Sonicfire Pro for creating custom soundtracks; SoundSoap for removing noise from your digitized albums; LightZone for photo adjustment and FotoMagico to make slide shows in HD. And there’s more that I won’t take time to list.

And the list of improved features in Toast itself is impressive as well. You can now save web video from sites like YouTube. You can now rip an audiobook CD set to a iTunes file with chapter markers. You can archive the contents of your HD video camera on disks. You can extract clips from DVD Video. You can stream movies from your Mac to your TiVo. You can combine multiple videos into a single file for DVD projects.

Other features have been improved. CD Spin Doctor, Roxio’s audio capture program, now automatically identifies captured tracks and sends them to iTunes. The user interface for the Media Browser has been improved to make it easier to select photos and videos. DiskCatalogMaker now supports CoverFlow browsing.

Hardware requirements are pretty broad, including any Mac from a G4 up and a DVD recordable drive. But it does require Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Two versions are available, Toast 10 Titanium (US$100) and Toast 10 Titanium Pro ($150). Currently there is a $20 mail-in rebate to lower the prices to $80 and $130. For information, go here.

There are a few idiosyncrasies in the included software, mostly because the software bundle is from various small vendors. This is not a bad thing, as these are some of the best programs of their kind out there. But it does mean that sometimes you have to work a little harder because the programs were not made to work together. This is nowhere near a deal-breaker.

If you haven’t used Toast in a few years, it’s worth your while to explore this package.

Macsimum Rating: 9 out of 10.

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