Customer Reviews

Toast 6 Titanium

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Macs come with quite a robust burner in the Finder and the new iLife '04 goes even further than before in giving users more options to customize their discs. So what exactly does Toast do that the Mac OS can't do on it's own?

- Multi Session Burning
- Encrypt data discs with a password
- Burn exact copies of a disc
- Choose which OS the disc will be compatible with
- You can save a burn project so you can burn it again at a later date

These features alone make Toast a very tempting purchase. Thankfully though, it can do much more and it pulls it all off with ease. Drag and drop is about as complicated as the interface gets, but the results are that you have discs burned the way you want that work the way you want. Toast is a powerful, well-rounded, fully featured burning software that just about every user will find useful.

As a bonus you get Discus (for making labels for all those discs you've burnt) and Spin Doctor 2 (for taking out pops and hiss from imported music from records and tapes).

I have an external Lacie DVD writer that is not supported by Apple's iDVD. Toast 6 makes it a simple to create DVDs from my iMovies and iPhoto albums and blows away the crumby software that came with the DVD writer. Highly recommended.

Working with RoxioÕs Toast 6.0

I use QuickTime Pro for editing my movies with sound clips. ToastÕs CD Spin Doctor 2.0 allows me to bring in sound from my turntableÕs LP (Long Playing) records. CD Spin Doctor 2.0 takes out the hisses and jumps from the LP records. I then import the LP recordsÕ AAF sounds into QuickTime Pro and lay down the new sound track. I appreciate CD Spin Doctor 2.0 utility that makes it easier for me to digitize LP records and cassettes. Within Toast's Audio tab, QuickTime formats (AAC, AIFF, MP3, WAV) is easily converted when you burn your audio CDs.

Toast Motion Pictures give you the opportunity to bring in your photos and create Òmovie motion.Ó Then, you can save them as QuickTime movies.

You can make several movies to SVCD (Super Video CD) and with Roxio Toast you can burn the SVCDs. Each SVCD screen shows three photo buttons with right-hand arrows. I have already saved nine QuickTime movies to an SVCD disk.

RoxioÕs Toast Rules

The standard rates for burning: High VCD with 60 min., SVCD with 20 min. and DVD for 60 min. My computer projects dictate which Toast selection that I use.

Burning Mac/Window CDs are excellent for QuickTime movies, PDFs (Portable Document Format), text documents and photographs. This works well for items that will be used on Mac and Windows platforms.

Super VCDs. What works for me is using SVCD exclusively for QuickTime movies that play on most new DVD players. The quality is fair to good on standard CD burners.

I can burn my movies from good to better quality when using my new Pioneer DVD burner. You can use large size photos to capture quality photos for editing in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

DVD. Quality blank DVDs for DVD-R cost about $1.50 per DVD. The viewing quality is excellent and looks great on DVD players hooked to large screen televisions. Also, I can play my one-time recorded DVD-R in my computerÕs DVD/CD drive.

Pro Reaction

Roxio's Web site provides an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and a searchable database of support articles. ToastÕs hard copy manual is informative and has good illustrations. Toast is intuitive and easy to use. It pays to study the Toast manualÊÊand learn the expert qualities of RoxioÕs Toast.

I appreciate the new compression and 128-bit encryption options for Mac computer DVDs and CDs. Also, Toast can import footage directly from your DV camcorder with the simple Plug and Burn feature. Toast handles the hard, tedious work of importing, converting, and encoding content for burning to CDs or DVDs.

Con Reaction

Toast burning is slow on Mac G3 computers and can take all night for copying my DVD movies. Recommend a Mac G4 or G5 computer for faster Toast burning.

Final Remarks

Toast 6.0 gives you the ability to make quality CDs, SVCDs and DVDs. The Roxio Toast program is an excellent buy for your computer dollar.

I would recommend Toast 6 over any other burning app on the Mac (yes, the finder included). I can make PC compatible discs for sharing with my friends, burn straight out of iphoto, itunes, use iMovie projects without having to export them (which takes forever). Toast 6 works great with my Lacie FireWire 106 drive and my G5.

Toast 6 also came with CD Spin Doctor 2 (very nice!) Discus (label maker program) and Motion Pictures (easier than iPhoto + ken burns effects).

If you haven't, purhcase this product, it does not get simpler than this.

Toast 6.0 Titanium
Most software upgrades improve the product a bit and perhaps add compatibility for a new operating system. Not Toast. Toast 6.0 is a HUGE upgrade from Toast 5. Its almost another program. So many features have been added that you may find yourself using Toast 6.0 as a multimedia creation tool, as much as a CD/DVD burner. It took me a while just to get my arms around all the features Toast 6 provides.

New Features
Toast 6.0 new features include Toast It (The ability to burn with one click from the desktop), ToastAnywhere (use any burner on your network), QuickRecord, 128-bit encryption with password protection, data compression, automatic backup to CD, DVD, or network storage. Converts WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC or any iTunes track into an audio CD, creates photo media shows with sound, creates VCD and SVCDs with menus, create DVDs with menus, buttons and chapters, Plug & Burn (burn disks automatically from your camcorder, universal video converter and Disc Extractor (extract and reuse an iDVD or Toast disc). Wow, that is a mouth full. ...

When you burn a disc, what Toast does is plenty complex, but it hides all that behind a superbly elegant, simple interface. Toast resembles a written-in-Cupertino piece of Apple software that way. Better yet, it all works flawlessly, trumping -- by a wide margin -- the built-in disc burning software that comes with OS X. I've burned about ten discs so far in Toast, mostly DVDs, and have yet to experience the first rejected disc; before, almost HALF the discs I attempted to burn were spat out halfway through the process due to some obscure disc error (which I'm beginning to think was most likely a software error, really). With Toast, I've used both Apple-branded blanks and Verbatim Datalife discs with excellent results.

I thought the 20-dollar rebate made the price unbeatable, but when I read the fine print I found that it's an UPGRADE rebate. As this is my first version of Toast, I was out of luck. (Disappointing, but my own damn fault for not checking the offer more carefully before I bought.)

I just wanted a burner. This took everything from my camera and digital capture device. Converted to dvd and burned it all with one click. I never expected it to be so easy and do everything for me.

I'm very happy with Toast 6 so far. I wanted to create slideshows on SVCDs and DVDs and this does the trick for me. Very easy to use and they look great on my TV.

The support has been fine for my needs. For the guy who wrote the review below I went back and found my Toast 5 box. It has a sticker on the front that says go to www.roxio.com/toastosx to download the updates for OS X. I downloaded mine over a year ago after Roxio posted them. I checked today - they're still there for you to get.

When I bought my eMac, this was the first software I HAD to buy. I make a lot of CDs, so I decided that this was a must, and I've owned Easy CD Creator for the PC, so I knew that it would be easy to use and feature most of the functions I would need.

It's true that it meets most of my needs and with a simple, clean interface. I can make a music CD and store files in no time and it can even create Video CDs and DVDs with menus.

Of course, to many, Toast may seem redundant, as Mac OS X can handle most of your burning needs natively, but I prefer to use 3rd party software for those things, as it was created specifically for that purpose. However, the two things that Toast can do that Panther cannot are create Video CDs and burn DVDs directly from MPEG and Quicktime files without the need to demux audio.

I get some Japanese TV shows from friends in Japan in MPEG format and I like to watch them on my TV, so it's nice to be able to burn them into VCD or DVD format for viewing and backup. If you do a lot of video downloading, this really can come in handy. Also, it works GREAT with EyeTV (sold separately) for the Mac, so you can record your favorite TV shows and put them on CD!

My only complaint is that the DVD/VCD menu option stinks. There is only one menu interface and you cannot choose layout, music, background photo or anything. It's just a plain blue screen with a thumbnail of the video and text titles. And the thing is, it's not very nice--it's borderline gaudy and not what I'd choose for a standard menu layout.

But, with that aside, this is a product I can wholeheartedly recommend for any Mac user with above-average burning needs.

If you're happy using Toast 5 and are a heavy user of the bundled Spin Doctor, stick with it--unless you have OSX. Toast is the fastest and handiest CD-burning software I've tried, and I was content with my old version until the application for converting analog to digital (Spin Doctor) refused to open up in OSX, even with the update downloaded from Roxio. Toast 6 solves that problem while providing more colorful graphics and increased automation. The defining of a track is "streamlined," which takes some getting used to, and I have yet to figure out how to read and edit Toast wave forms, which are proving useless in this version. In order to recognize and remove "dead space" in a radio broadcast, I'm forced either to use the version of Spin Doctor in Toast 5 or go to Apple's bundled "Sound Studio." I'm also getting considerable distortion while monitoring an FM broadcast, a problem that's eliminated when I record in Sound Studio. Finally, with this edition Roxio has cut back a bit on both the packaging (no case for the installation CD) and the instruction manual (it's now mostly under the Help menu).

On the positive side, Toast is supremely effective and convenient for copying both CD's and DVD's, especially when accompanied by Roxio's "Popcorn." For recording LP's, I still plan to use Spin Doctor, which does quite well with automatic track recognition. But those colorful wave forms are little more than consumer cosmetics.