Customer Reviews

Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro [Old Version]

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

I wish I had read the reviews more closely before buying this product (particularly the companion reviews of the regular edition Roxio Toast 10). Usually I discount all the people who give low ratings for poor service as having just had a bad experience. In this case, though, I too have experienced the "unhelpful automated email response" bot. Given the number of reviewers who've mentioned the poor service, it isn't just a couple bad experiences.

Having used the product, I'm not surprised they've gone to automated response. They must be overwhelmed with support requests. The product is a bundle of different programs each of which is shareware-quality. There's no coherency in the user interfaces. Much of the interaction with your media involves dragging things around from the Finder. The "software update" process involves unzipping new applications and copying them on top of the old ones. No smart auto-update.

That said, the collection of "features" is impressive, even if not coherently arranged. AVCHD, Blu-Ray, H264, Elgato, iPhone, Apple TV, Tivo integration are all terrific features to have. I'll admit I haven't played with most of them yet. Thus far I've focused on the Tivo->iPhone pathway.

I installed it on my Macbook Air with attached Apple CD/DVD burner. Performance seems reasonable, though when I accidentally hit "edit" for a Tivo video or try to browse through a bunch of Tivo videos with the Media Browser, it becomes painfully slow.

But the main reason I'm giving it 2 stars is because the Tivo->iPhone pathway has serious defects. Namely, if you set up Tivo Transfer to automatically export to Toast and then set up Toast to automatically convert to iPhone and submit to iTunes, you lose all the series/episode meta-data. Instead each item is given a unique name which destroys the TV Show grouping in iTunes. iPhone syncing works by selecting the most recent unviewed episodes of your selected series. When every episode appears as its own new TV series, syncing becomes very painful.

Further, if you've moved the location of your iTunes media (say to an external drive), Toast can't tell and just puts it in the original location.

Additionally, if you tell Tivo Transfer not to automatically transfer and instead click "Toast It" from within Tivo Transfer, then you're automatically taken to the DVD-burning section of Toast. If you switch over to Convert to iPhone or Apple TV, you can no longer see the transferred video.

The only way I have found to convert items from Tivo to iPhone while preserving Series/Episode data is to find the raw video that Tivo downloaded in Finder and drag each one into Toast and click the convert button. This is rather painful given this is supposed to be a 1st-class feature of Roxio Toast 10.

I have additionally had problems with conversions failing half-way through, but continuing to use 100% of the machine's CPU. In my experience, trying to "Stop" a conversion in process is hit-or-miss... sometimes the CPU just keeps spinning until you manually kill the process from the shell. Also, if you set up Tivo to auto-convert, it appears there's no visible status of what is happening, so there's no way to stop.

In conclusion, for a product labeled "version 10" and "pro" it feels one step better than shareware, but if you need the features it may well be shareware worth buying... just expect some pain with no relief from product support.


** UPDATE **

Service has gone from bad to worse. Instead of answering my question as to why the Series/Episode data wasn't preserved when performing auto-export, they first responded with a general email telling me how to delete all my preferences and re-install Toast 10. I dutifully did as they suggested hoping there was a magic bullet there. Sadly it didn't help. When I replied again, they responded with a general email about how to reset and restart all my Tivos.

To make things worse, these boiler-plate emails spell "preferences" as "prefrences" and "MAC address" as "MAK address". Ridiculous.

After getting a replacement DVD because of a flawed file, I finally found out that it is the DVD itself from Roxio that is flawed. The Pro version contains a program called Sonicfire Pro 5. It also includes sounds for that program in the form of a dmg entitled Sonicfire Pro Bonus Audio Tracks.dmg on the DVD. The file will not mount. It fails during the verify because of a codec overrun. It has occurred on several DVDs and with several different computers. It doesn't matter if you first copy it to a hard drive or not. The point of this review is to point out that in over a week, Roxio has failed to rectify the problem. They blame it on Amazon (DVD already has been replaced once, and other users have the same problem), then on codecs in the Quicktime library folder (fails to install on a brand new virgin MacOS 10.5 disk). The program will not verify regardless of the many dmg tools out there (Disk Utility, Stuffit 13, et al). It is a corrupt fail and Roxio won't even bother to support it. The good news is that SmartSound (makers of Sonicfire Pro 5) has received complaints about the corrupt file and has provided a replacement file. Roxio won't (makers of the DVD), but a third party will. Go figure.

I recently purchased an AVCHD camera and began shooting, for the first time, in HD. The footage looked very nice when sent directly to my TV using an HDMI cable, but HORRIBLE when I made DVDs. After a lot of trial and error, I discovered that this Roxio product corrects an interesting problem with Macs running iDVD.

iLife '09 does not update iDVD. iDVD is basically unchanged from iLife '06. It cannot burn DVDs with HD content . . . well, let's just say that your DVDs will not LOOK like they have HD content! With Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro, you can burn HD content on STANDARD DISCS which play on your Blu-Ray player. STUNNING. I was teary-eyed watching the first HD footage of my daughter on a special day, because everything looked so REAL. There was no "chunking" or "zizzing" to distract the eye.

The bundled extras (SoundSoap, LightZone, etc.) are pretty neat, but I have other software I am used to using which do the same things, basically. FotoMagico's slideshows are jaw-dropping! They eat up a lot of disc space, but make your digital photos look truly splendid, even on a huge TV.

Some background: I have been shooting video in the mini-DV format for some time, and creating DVDs from my footage. I have a LOADED Intel Core 2 Duo iMac. I was editing my footage in Final Cut Express, and burning DVDs using iDVD. Footage from my DV camera looked awful on my HD LCD TV, but that was to be expected of standard definition footage, right? I thought that shooting in HD should fix that problem. Wrong. My Mac needed new software, and this Roxio product did the trick!

I hope this review helps.

I upgraded from Toast 8 to Toast 10 because when upgrading to Mac OS 10.5, CD SpinDoctor from TOast 8 would crash when defining tracks. I figured that the newer version of CD SpinDoctor would work better with the newer operating system. The upgrade to CD SpinDoctor solved the crashing problem when defining tracks but introduced numerous other problems. The waveform after recording an album was nonexistent. When saving a file, CD SpinDoctor would only save the first 5-10 minutes of the file. The rest would be lost as well as the track definitions and song titles. There's a place where you can put in data about each track (song title, artist, track number of..., disc number of ...). The only data that I could get to transfer to iTunes were the title and artist. No other data was passed to iTunes. At one point, the crash reporter counted 45 crashes since the last report. (I've owned the software for about a week.)

The only way to get CD SpinDoctor to display waveforms correctly was to reinstall system software. (I still couldn't save files under any circumstances.) Then I upgraded iTunes to version 9, QuickTIme to version 7.6.4, and applied the Apple provided security update. The waveform display problem returned. (A third party program should not stop working when applying relative minor system updates!) Given all of these problems, CD SpinDoctor is useless and that program was the reason I upgraded. It's probably the best solution for converting vinyl to digital if the program would work correctly. (Other programs like Audacity also work well but become too complex when I want to just record an album, divide it into tracks, and sent the tracks directly to iTunes with the metadata intact.)

I did interact with Roxio Technical support with this and that was also a disappointment. I opened a trouble ticket, explained the problem and then explained what I had done to fix it. It was obvious that the tech did not read my ticket completely because the tech suggested I do what I had already had attempted and reported earlier. This happened on at least two occasions. I did speak with a live person once who was very understanding, listened and sent me several things to try. All did nothing to alleviate the problem.

Since CD SpinDoctor was not able to save any files, I was unable to try the other programs in the package (Sound Soap to clean up files, Toast to burn audio CDs). If the other software programs are as fragile as CD SpinDoctor, it doesn't seem worth my time.

I will be attempting a refund but based on other users' experiences, I think I'm in for a long road. I'll be going back to Toast 8 and just be defining tracks manually instead of automatically to avoid crashes.

I have bought this Roxio Toast Pro to burn HD DVD's with my Mac. First I was so excited, as it worked great. After burning 3 movies it would not burn any more DVD's. I returned the software to Amazon and they sent me a replacement, which was great. Same problem. I had a Mac specialist at my house who tried, no go. Then I started to make Disk Images and burned the Disk Image. It worked for some movies, but not for others. So frustrating, as encoding takes so long, only to find out that there is an error somewhere.

All in all, it would be a great software if it worked. One gets no help from Toast, they charge $1.89 a minute for tech support, and want the credit card up-front. Too risky for me, so I let it go. A big disappointment. The problem might be at my end, but without any tech support, it is useless. I have tried to burn audio CD's, they would not play on my CD player. So all in all, iMovie, iDVD, and iTunes is far superior, with the exception, that it will not burn HD. Will have to wait until Apple comes out with a software to burn HD DVD's, or makes an external Blu-Ray player. I must admit, the few movies I did burn in HD looked great on a Blu-Ray player. Maybe there is hope with Roxio.

Erika

Fails to author a DVD Audio disc. For audio on a DVD Video disc, pause gaps are inserted and can't be removed despite setting the preference for zero gap.

Completely DOA. Customer support will say anything (ie. lie) to make the sale and then play dumb with technical support (continually answering very specific questions with "What software are you trying to use again?")

AVOID THIS PRODUCT AT ALL COST!

I rarely write reviews, but felt I had to warn others about my experience. 1st overall I love the main program. BUT as you load the additional programs that come with it in some cases you are forced to pay for an upgrade to run the most current version. AND the upgrade cost wasn't a mere $5 or 10, it was substantial relative to the price for this software. So be warned and be aware!

I have a very high end Mac Pro and bought Toast Titanium Pro in a bundle with an external Blu-Ray burner. Every time I click the mouse in Toast, I get a spinning beach ball for 30 seconds. I upgraded to the latest version of Toast. This is a system with a very fast disk array and 24 GB of RAM. Everything flies except for Toast.

Do not buy this or bundles with it; it's a total waste of money.

Update Nov 2010 -- Well, something changed or the newest version of Toast fixes the problem I was having. In any event, I am finally able to use Toast to burn blu-ray discs.

BEWARE! Software is shipped without HD Plug-in Serial Code, and when contacting Roxio they say return it for another copy that MAY contain the code!!!

Toast 10 was clearly not ready to be released. It was obviously not tested in the real world. If you are looking to use its Blu-Ray features, good luck. They only work some of the time and you can't predict when. If you try to make a Blu-Ray disc, the program will tell you that you have succeeded but the disc will often not play. Their customer support is terrible. Don't waste your money. Wait until something better comes along.