Roxio Toast 7 Titanium

Over the years, Toast has changed hands more times than a Christmas fruitcake, yet still manages to remain (arguably, of course) the king of Mac-based disc authoring programs even amid a growing list of alternatives. Now owned by Sonic (yet still distributed under the Roxio moniker), Toast 7 Titanium packs a host of very useful new features and improvements that continue the proud Toast tradition, and despite the inexplicable continuation of what is perhaps the worst upgrade "deal" in the history of software, is still a good value.

I've been using Toast for over a decade, starting out when "affordable" burners ran more than a grand and 550 MB blank CD ROMs were $10 apiece. I'm actually kind of shocked Toast has lasted as long as it has, but it just keeps chugging along. Version 7 continues Toast's transformation from straight-up disc authoring tool to all-around media management utility, packing new features in while still retaining its signature simple interface and famous ease-of use. At $99 (but can be found for much less with a little shopping), Toast 7 Titanium is priced for consumers, but packs features that are essential for pros as well. Let's take a spin around some of the more noteworthy new features and improvements and see what's doin' under the hood.

True to its roots

Historically, chore numero uno for Toast has been burning data discs, which is unsurprising considering the product's name. Burning is still the foundation of Toast 7, but it's now simpler and more flexible than ever. Toast has always been something of a boon to CD and DVD ROM authors for mastering discs (yes, there are still some of us out there), offering Mac-only, ISO 9660 (cross-platform, with optional Windows-friendly extensions), and custom hybrid discs (which show up as native on either platform, with the ability to share content and hide specific files depending on platform). Later, Toast added support for regular hybrid discs (no file masking) and UDF discs (for DVD-ROMs). That's a lot of options, but there's nothing new on that front in Toast 7. What is new, however, is the streamlined way Toast authors custom hybrid discs.

In previous versions of Toast, custom hybrids were a somewhat convoluted process. You had to create a temporary disk partition for the Mac volume, drag that to Toast, then drag the Windows-only files into Toast, and then pick the files from the temporary volume that needed to be shared between platforms. It was not for the faint of heart. In Toast 7, the custom hybrid option has been folded into the Mac & PC settings, offering simple checkboxes to hide or show content for each platform (fig. 1).

Figure 1

Macintosh disc options have also been greatly improved, which comes into play not just for Mac-only discs, but for hybrid ones as well. Anyone who has struggled with the voodoo that was the Mac disc prep process and not knowing what was going to happen when the finished disc was run on a Mac will be thrilled with the new disc settings (fig. 2, top). You can drag in a custom icon, set the default window view (icon, list, or column), choose a color or image as the window background, and set whether the disc window will open automatically when the disc runs (fig. 2, bottom).

Figure 2

In addition to the various disc formats you can burn, Toast can still handle pretty much any disc type you throw at it—CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+-R, DVD+-RW, DVD-RAM, Dual Layer DVDs, and so on. You're pretty much only limited by what your resident burner will support. Actually, that's not even true, as Toast 7 includes the Toast Anywhere feature that lets you share a burner over a network that other Toast users can write to, and with the ability to author discs without burning (which we'll get into a bit later), you don't even have to have a burner on your machine for Toast to still be useful.

The Media Browser

OK, we all know Toast can burn discs. But more than anything, Toast's bag of late is helping you gather and prep your media for burning. Data, music, video, you name it—Toast can help you manage it. The biggest new step in that direction is the Media browser (fig. 3), which is a persistent area that aggregates your Movie folder, iTunes Library, iPhoto Library, and (if you have it installed) your EyeTV Library.

Figure 3

Here's how the Media Browser works: let's say you've recorded a couple of TV shows using EyeTV, and you want to transfer them to a Video CD so you can watch them on a regular DVD player. With earlier versions of Toast, you had to export the shows out of EyeTV, and then drag them into Toast. But since Toast 7 integrates your EyeTV library directly into the Media Browser, it's just a simple drag and drop (fig. 4).

Figure 4

DVD everywhere

Toast 7 boasts a ton of new options for DVD creation, which include:

More menu themes. There are no motion menus, which means that Toast will never be a replacement for even iDVD, but at least you have some choices now (fig. 5). With a little digging, it appears you can add your own themes as well, but I'll save that for a separate tutorial.

Figure 5

DVD Copying. Toast 7 folds Roxio's $30 standalone product, Popcorn, into the new release. Choose a DVD to copy, select the "Fit-to-DVD video compression" from the options list, and Toast will automatically compress a dual-layer DVD down to regular 4.7 GB size. And before you go getting any ideas, Toast will not work its magic on encrypted DVDs—only unprotected ones (like those burned from iDVD, for example).

DivX. The hot-hot-hot DivX video codec makes its debut in Toast in a big way. Toast 7 includes both the DivX 6 Pro encoder and decoder (the decoder enables playback of DivX movies in any QuickTime-aware application), as well as a DivX DVD option (fig. 6), which are designed to be playable on any DivX-enabled DVD player. The upshot of DivX DVDs are that they can contain and display 720p HD content, even though regular DVDs can't. I happen to have such a player, and while I don't have a High-Def TV, the results are impressive. And since DivX DVDs can hold 10 times more video than regular DVDs, they're perfect for archiving things like home videos.

Figure 6

Music DVDs. A new feature in Toast 7, Music DVDs are created by dragging a series of music tracks into a DVD Video to create playlists, and Toast will convert the tracks to Dolby Digital format and create navigable menus and track listings for playback of audio files through regular DVD players (fig. 7). It works really well, and the sound stays pretty clear even through the conversion process.

Figure 7

So that's some of the bigger stuff in the media management department. But we're not done just yet.

Useful even without burning

I'm one of those weirdoes that hates to burn CD or DVDs when I don't have to. With the abundance of cheap hard disk storage space and disk-based video players like the PSP and iPod Video popping up, optical media is starting to seem so last century. Even in my professional life, when I master a CD or DVD ROM title for a client, I'll only burn for testing purposes, preferring to use ISO images mounted in virtual optical drives for most of the heavy lifting. And even when I deliver the finished product it usually involves uploading the aforementioned ISO image to a FTP server anyway, so would Toast be useful for a disc Scrooge like myself? The answer is absolutely, as Toast has a few non-burning options that make it a very well-rounded product.

First of all, you can save any disc to a disc image, which will create standard ISO files (through a simple rename or the .toast extension to .iso) that will mount on OS X with a double-click or through a virtual drive (or a program like Virtual PC or VMWare) on Windows.

Another non-burning option, and one that is an extremely useful stealth feature, is the ability to use Toast as a batch audio and video encoding utility. Drag a clip (or series of clips) into Toast, hit the Export button, and you get a menu of all the formats you can export your media to (fig. 8). There are even presets for the PSP, and you can use the MPEG-4 or H.264 options to export video for the iPod (if you need help there, enjoy the shameless plug for this article). And for all you audiophiles out there, you'll be pleased as punch to know that the Ogg Vorbis and FLAC codecs are supported as well.

Figure 8

The last thing I'll mention in what has become the "gee whiz" section is that in addition to the media export function, you can perform captures from DV devices using Toast. Just attach a camcorder or media converter to your Mac via FireWire, and Toast will automatically recognize the device and offer capture options right off the bat (fig. 9). You really can set up an end-to-end media workflow all in Toast, which shows how far it's come over the years.

Figure 9

Extras

Not stopping at all the stuff it includes inside the package, Toast 7 Titanium also ships with a suite of external utilities that may or may not be of use, depending on who you are and what you need Toast for. First up is the Finder integration that Toast optionally installs. The Toast It utility sends selected files from the Finder to Toast, while Mount It lives up to its name and mounts disc images in the Finder.

Toast 7 also installs (again, optionally) Déjà Vu, a Preference Pane-based backup program that allows you to schedule pretty comprehensive backups at intervals of your choosing to either another hard drive (or different folder on the same drive ) or to a disc using Toast (fig. 10).

Figure 10

And for your disc labeling needs, Discus is another external program Toast 7 ships with. It's a relatively vanilla labeling app, which appears to be a bad port from another platform, but it does a passable job if you don't happen to have anything better.

Oh, but we're not done yet. In order to capture audio from external analog sources, Toast includes CD Spin Doctor, a relatively simple app for recording audio files. The latest version includes a pretty slick Dashboard Widget for those times you need to record on a whim (fig. 11).

Figure 11

OK, almost there. The last extra to mention is an entirely new application—Motion Pictures HD, or MPHD for short (fig. 12). It's a bit of a puzzler. MPHD combines photos with audio tracks (using the same Media Browser drawer that Toast uses) into music-based slideshows, complete with the vaunted "Ken Burns effect" that iMovie user are used to. Plus, it can create these slideshows in HD resolution (which would explain the "HD" part of "Motion Pictures HD"). If you have iMovie, you probably won't want to use MPHD, but if you are looking for something a little different from your photo-based slideshows, I suppose MPHD will do in a pinch. It's kind of a one-trick pony, and I really don't see myself using this program at all, but since it's a throw-in, I'm not going to complain too much.

Figure 12

Anyway, there are a fair amount of extras included with Toast, and it's likely that at least one of them will be of some additional value on top of what Toast gives you natively.

Upgrade ugh

I've been pretty glowing up until now, but no review of Toast would be complete without mentioning just how horrible Toast's upgrade pricing, such as it is, continues to be. Despite the fact that pretty much every new version of Toast has historically been packed with worthy features, Sonic/Roxio continues to abuse loyal customers with this hideous upgrade scheme. It works something like this: Toast lists for $99. However, if you are an existing Toast user, it still costs $99, but Sonic/Roxio will graciously send you $20 back in the mail if you go through the rigamarole of filling out the rebate form. How magnanimous. And even though you can find Toast cheaper than the list price (you can often find "deals" on the Roxio site itself), expecting returning customers to shell out up to 80% of the product's original price just for an upgrade is downright unconscionable. I'd happily pay $30 for upgrades, but twice that (and sometimes more) is ridiculous. Yet people pay it, so the sad saga of the bad Toast upgrade continues.

The bottom line

There's so much to Toast that I'm positive I left something out, but suffice it to say that even factoring in the hideous upgrade price, Toast 7 still delivers the goods. Toast 7 packs numerous, thoughtful features that keeps it ahead of the pack, even in the face of Tiger's improved native disc burning functionality. There's a whole lot to like about Toast 7 Titanium, so it earns a Strong Buy rating (missing the Must Buy solely because of the upgrade pricing). Toast 7 Titanium is available now, and lists for $99 with a $20 rebate for returning customers.

Filed under: Review on December 19th, 2005

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