Review: New Toast is very tasty

Posted by Dennis Sellers Feb 28, 2007 at 2:36am

The last time we took Roxio’s Toast product for a test drive, we gave it a score of 9 out of 10. Toast 8 Titanium, an upgrade to the Mac disc burning software, upholds that rating and adds still more mouth-watering features.

The update includes features and enhancements that help redefine the standard for disc burning on the Mac platform. Toast 8 brings TiVo and the Mac together, letting you watch TV programs on your Mac, burn them to disc, or convert them for viewing on a mobile device such as an iPod or PlayStation Portable.

Complementing the features of iTunes, Toast 8 also enables users to apply professional-quality tools to create superior sounding audio CD mixes and music DVDs. Going beyond the burning options included in Mac OS X, Toast 8 introduces Blu-ray Disc burning, as well as automatic disc cataloging, cross-platform data spanning, and disc restoration. I have to confess that I don’t have a Blu-ray burner, so I can’t test this feature out—yet.

As mentioned, Toast 8 offers support for digital video recorders, including TiVo and EyeTV. Toast 6 and 7 enabled Mac users to burn EyeTV’s MPEG files to video DVD. However, the popular TiVo, however, remained relatively closed to Mac users – until now. The network-enabled Tivo Series 2 DVD made it possible to copy recorded shows to a Windows PC running TiVo2Go software. TiVo has promised Mac support for some time, but, alas, it’s been limited. A TiVo device can play music from iTunes, but a Mac couldn’t play movies from a TiVo without using open source utilities that could transfer TiVo content to the Mac and convert it into a standard video format. But that’s all changed, and all I can say is, “Thank you, Roxio.”

Toast 8’s TiVo Transfer” utility connects to your TiVo and copies shows onto your Mac. It works as speedily as fast as your network connection allows; however, it doesn’t decode TiVo’s particular flavor of MPEG to a more standard format. You can play a TiVo show on the Mac with a viewer by the folks at El Gato (who make the excellent EyeTV software), burn it to a video DVD with Toast 8, or use Toast to convert it to any a format that’s optimized for handheld devices.

With TiVo Transfer, you can auto-transfer shows. Combined with a TiVo Season Pass, this lets you move all episodes of selected shows to your Mac, where you can then transfer them to an iPod, Sony PlayStation Portable or DVD. For example, adding TiVo shows to a video DVD can be done by simple drag and dropping. Toast sends exported TiVo shows to iTunes with the title of the episode, a description and more. TiVo shows are also added to a new playlist called “Toast.” Except for DVD burning, TiVo limits exported files to 320×240 pixels. While this is a perfect fit for the 5G (video-enabled) iPod, it’s not up to the 640×480 quality of a standard TV image. You can use Toast’s advanced settings to improve the video if you’ve got time for a bit of fiddling—and a reasonably robust Mac.

Toast 8 offers a familiar, yet tweaked, user interface that offers visual feedback and a media browser. It’s more streamlined and resembles Mac OS X 10.4’s “unified” look more than the traditional “Aqua” look. Also, the Toast 8 interface wisely unifies the disc types and options in a menu on the left, which shows the relationship between major disc types (Data, Audio, Video, Copy) and sub-types (Audio CD, Music DVD, MP3 Disc, Enhanced Audio CD, etc). The media browser is also much improved, offering a floating palette akin to Mac OS X’s own media browser.

The new Toast Photo Disc feature lets you store thousands of full-resolution pictures as well as an auto-run slideshow on a photo disk. But let’s back up. Toast 8 includes a new type of data disc, Photo Disc, a cross-platform CD with standard photo files and Mac and Windows photo viewers. The Mac viewer on a Photo Disc uses Mac OS X 10.4’s slideshow features, including thumbnails, “Add to iPhoto” and slideshow controls. Hopefully, this means that Toast Photo Discs can inherit any slideshow enhancements introduced in future versions of Mac OS X.

Toast 8 provides new ways to personalize your discs with labels, cover art, and inserts. Featuring full drawing and text editing tools, as well as over 600 clip art images and Google image search. Toast also supports LightScribe drives and media to allow you to burn artwork and labels directly on discs.

Toast 8 provides DJ-style crossfades, volume normalization tools, sound enhancing plug-ins, track trimming capabilities, and other features previously found in Roxio’s Jam software. In addition to great sounding audio CDs, users can create 50-hour music DVDs complete with on-screen menus, shuffle play, and Dolby Digital sound. Toast 8 also supports using Mac OS X 10.4’s Audio Units plug-ins that are used in such products as GarageBand. Up to three AUs can be applied to a track. The standard Apple Audio Units provide some nifty functions such as reverb and dynamics, which you can expand upon and flesh out with several free and commercial AUs.

Toast also incorporates the features of Roxio’s DVD compression and extraction utility, Popcorn 2. Its conversion features may be less polished than those offered by dedicated DVD conversion tools, but they’re a breeze to use.

The update also adds the nifty CD Spin Doctor Assistant, which guides you through the process, from setting up the equipment all the way through burning a disc or converting tracks for enjoyment on portable devices. Additionally, you can recover data from scratched or damaged discs that may be unreadable in the Mac OS Finder. With Toast 8’s Disc Recovery tools, you can recover from read errors encountered during disc copying and recover some files from damaged discs to create new clean copies of the previously unreadable disc.

You can can backup an entire 9GB DVD to a standard 4.7 GB DVD disc. Fit-to-DVD compression uses all available disc space to maximize video quality. Toast also features Director’s Cut custom compilations, so you can select the specific video, audio, and languages you wish to record or convert individual video files for use on a portable video device.

Toast 8 also includes Deja Vu backup software. It, CD Spin Doctor, Disc Cover, and Motion Pictures HD are all are Universal Binaries apps that, like Toast itself, run natively on PowerPC and Intel Macs. That is except for Motion Pictures HD, which, for some reason, isn’t a Universal Binary update. Still, it runs pretty well in the Rosetta environment on Mactels.

With Toast 8, you can automatically catalog the contents of your discs so they can track the contents even when the disc is no longer in the drive. This works automatically with discs created in Toast, as well as with previously burned and commercial discs, such as audio CDs. Toast adds newly burned data discs to a catalog automatically (unless you disable the feature), and you can manually add your existing discs.

The update’s data-spanning feature lets you back-up data of any size, such as entire music or photo libraries, iMovie projects, and DV files. The feature automatically splits files and folders across multiple discs, and maintains the folder and file structure for retrieval on any Mac OS X, Windows XP, or Windows Vista system. I could care less, but Toast 8 also has better support for Windows users; disk spanning now includes a Windows restore utility, and Toast 8’s picture CD/DVD’s will automatically invoke the Windows picture viewer upon insertion.

So what did I not like about Toast 8 Titanium? There’s no support for Apple’s Aperture library, which would have been nice since Aperture can now export info for iLife applications.

I haven’t run across the problem, but apparently VPN clients appear to interfere with TiVo Transfer, and mis-entered TiVo Media Access Keys can cause problems as well for some Toast users.

Toast 8 Titanium is available now at a suggested price of US$79.99. Owners of previous versions may be eligible for upgrade offers. You’ll need Mac OS X 10.4 to use the product.

If you’ve never tried Toast, well, you don’t know what you’re missing. If you have tried it and liked it, then be assured that you’ll love the latest version.

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10.

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