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Review: buttering up with Toast 9

Posted by Dennis Sellers Apr 12, 2008 at 12:47am

I’ve long been a fan of Roxio’s Toast Titanium, its CD/DVD creation tool for the Mac. The latest version (9.0) adds even more useful features—such as provide improved disc-spanning and backup options for Mac users.

The BIG FEATURE is that Toast 9 sports Blu-ray support, which lets you do things such as burn AVCHD camera footage to an HD disc from your Mac. However, it’s still not possible to do Blu-ray playback on the Mac, so I’m not sure how many folks will need this feature. In other words, you can author and burn high-definition Blu-ray video discs and even high-definition DVDs for playback on Blu-ray set top players.

Since disc burning can be resource intensive, Toast 9 Titanium helps you save time by allowing you to pause DVD and video conversion tasks to free up CPU resources temporarily—and resume the process at a later time. To do the Blu-ray video authoring, you’ll need a HD/BD Plug-in, which is offered separately from Toast 9 for US$19.99.

The update of Toast comes with 15 new widescreen HD menu themes and supports BD-R/RE and DL, as well as DVD-R, RW and DL media. PlayStation 3 owners (and I’m not one) should be warned that its Blu-ray drive doesn’t recognize the discs burned by Toast 9, so there are still some bugs to be worked out.

Another new feature—and, to me, a more practical one—of Toast 9 is Roxio Streamer, which is designed to “put TV in the palm of your hand.” With it you can stream video to your Mac, PC, iPhone or iPod touch. For example, you can automatically convert new TiVo recordings and receive email notification when a new show is available for streaming. Very cool.


Speaking of TiVo, Roxio Streamer supports automatic end-to-end recording and serving of TiVo DVR shows—or any video file supported by Toast. TiVo-recorded shows can be automatically downloaded from your TiVo device to a Mac using TiVoToGo, converted to the proper bit rate and sent to Streamer for streaming online. You access the video through Roxio’s web site via a password assigned to you.

I also like the fact that the new version of Toast offers direct access to iMovie ‘08 projects and Aperture libraries—though I still find iMovie ‘08 a step backward (no, make that two steps backward) from iMovie HD.

Since I’m a big fan of Elgato’s EyeTV software, I also like the way Toast 9 lets you crop and trim your TV recordings and other video. You can easily remove unwanted segments from your video. The Roxio software also offers automatic end-to-end recording and serving of TiVo DVR shows. And speaking of Elgato, Toast 9 supports the company’s Turbo.264 video coprocessor, another nice touch.

With Toast 9, you can also expand your library by capturing streaming audio from any source, including the Internet. Basically, any audio you can hear through your hardware’s speakers, such as Internet radio, can be recorded. You can also set recording times. After capturing your
audio, you can edit, enhance, and transfer it to iTunes or burn to disc. Like most everything else about Toast, all these can be done with easy steps.

Toast 9’s audio fingerprinting technology identifies untagged music files and adds artist, track name and other file info. It found info that the Add Album Artwork in iTunes couldn’t. What’s more, the software has expanded format support for editing audio files. You can import and edit MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF and more.


Another time-saving feature: you can combine multiple DVDs on a single disc with the DVD compilation feature. You can queue up multiple VIDEO_TS folder with Toast 9’s batch DVD conversion.

Toast 9 comes with Disc Cover LE for printing labels, case covers and inserts. You can import project information directly from Toast and iLife. It comes with over 600 clip art images, as well as a basic set of drawing and text editing tools. Disc Cover LE includes support for printing to paper labels, Direct to Disc CD and DVD printers, as well as LightScribe and Labelflash laser-etching technology.

Toast 9 Titanium’s all new backup application, Get Backup, is pretty convenient, especially if you have no other backup software. After all, there are few files more precious than those with your photos, music and movies. Get Backup may not be as comprehensive as, say, Super Duper, but it does simplify the scheduling of backups and offers fairly complete control over backing up individual files and folders.

The media browser provides access to your files from within Toast. You can import playlists and projects from iLife applications via drag and drop. The media browser “floats” as a separate window, which means it’s always available. Just click the button above the Content Area, select Show Media Browser from the Window menu, or press Ctrl-S keys. The media browser fades away when you put Toast into the background or minimize it to the dock.

The media browser provides access to your files, iTunes music, iPhoto and Aperture libraries, iMovie projects, EyeTV shows, TiVo shows, and DVDs, including discs from set-top DVD recorders, DVD camcorders, iDVD discs, VIDEO_TS folders and AVCHD camcorders. It features integrated Spotlight search and filters. And in a very Mac-like touch, you can hold the mouse pointer over items in the window to see more info about the file.

Another feature Mac, or at least Leopard, users will appreciate is Quick Look support in the Media Browser on Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”). Leopard users can select an item and press the space bar to open a Quick Look preview. To close the preview, press the spacebar a second time.

Toast 9 has a new Convert tab for audio and video conversion projects that offers beefed up conversion functionality. Other new features include: tool tips for every function; more info for project capacity data; large DVD menu previews; a “prompt for disk name feature; and the ability to hide legacy project types to reduce clutter.

For anyone who wants to do more with their music, photos and movies than you can with iLife ‘08 (and you can certainly do plenty with the Apple bundle), Toast 9 offers a nice complement to Apple’s software. Think of it as iLife on steroids.

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10

Toast 9 is compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. A Mac with a PowerPC G4, PowerPC G5, or Intel processor and QuickTime 7.1.3 or higher is required.

The software is available in six languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. The cost is $99.99; discounts will be available online for users of earlier versions as soon as version 9 launches.

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