Roxio Toast 8 Titanium

Toast has been around for what seems like forever, dutifully providing us fun-lovin' and free-wheelin' Mac users with delicious disc burning goodness throughout all the tumult and upheaval the last decade-and-a-half (or so) has brought to the world of computing. And while that last statement was perhaps a tad dramatic, the point is that Toast is a very mature product which Roxio somehow manages to make more and more useful with every release, and Toast 8 Titanium is no exception.

It seemed like only yesterday that I reviewed Toast 7 Titanium, and while "yesterday" in this case really means just a hair over one year, the fact remains that it hasn't been very long between Toast releases. But don't let the short span fool you—Toast 8 is packed to the rafters with new and cool stuff. If I didn't know better, at the rate Roxio is pumping out Toast versions and applying the famous "near full price" upgrade scheme (which continues to irk me) to each new rev, I'd think that Toast was entering the realm of subscription software (a la iLife). But regardless of the philosophy behind how and why Toast receives a spanking new version number, the matter at hand is what's going on with Toast 8, and the bottom line there is that Toast continues to grow from its humble disc burning beginnings into a general purpose media management utility that appeals to an increasing number of user types.

Before we dive into it, let me outline what this review will be (and what it won't). I'm pretty much going to stick to new and improved features here, since those by themselves are good for a few thousand (or so) words. While that approach may make for a somewhat meandering and unfocused piece, it's probably the best way to cover the significant changes that Toast 8 offers to all of its ever-varied users types. What won't be discussed is Toast in general; the review I did of Toast 7 back in December 2005 is a little broader overview of the product (and is still perfectly valid in that regard), so allow me to avail myself of the twin opportunities to 1) not offer a re-tread of already-published information and 2) shamelessly plug my earlier piece on this particular topic. And with that out of the way, let's start our whirlwind tour of what Toast 8 brings to the table.

Full disclosure: what I can't test

At this point, I'm going to go ahead and cop to something that may cause you to stop reading right now: since I don't have access to either a TiVo box or a Blu-ray burner, I can't actually test two of the biggest new features in Toast 8. But while I can't try them out, I can mention what they do, or at least what they're supposed to do. I'll get to TiVo a bit later during the rundown of the Toast Extras, but as for Blu-ray, it ostensibly works like any other disc format Toast supports (albeit with the advantage of holding much, much more data or video). One useful enhancement inherent to Blu-ray recording within Toast is a feature called Toast Dynamic Writing, which allows you to use a BD-RE disc as an external storage device. Files are added to and removed from the disc simply by dragging and dropping files into and out of the disc icon on the Desktop (regardless of whether or not Toast itself is running). While all that sounds cool, I must reiterate that I wasn't able to try it out for myself, so can't speak to how well it actually works in the real world. So with all that said, let's get into what I could test, which certainly is plenty.

Interface

If you've ever used Toast before, the first thing that leaps out at you when firing up Toast 8 for the first time is the completely redesigned interface (fig. 1):

Figure 1

The four main functions (Data, Audio, Video, and Copy) have been moved from the top of the interface to the left-hand side, leaving the main area of the interface uncluttered for the various media management tasks. Beneath the four functions is a contextual panel that reflects the options available to you for a particular task. So, for example, if you select Video CD, the Options panel will present only the options that are relevant to that selection (fig. 2). Roxio has added some gratuitous animation to this panel, sliding it into and out of view as necessary.

Figure 2

In fact, animation is everywhere in Toast 8, from the aforementioned sliding panel to a choppily "morphing" window that serves as the transition between the setup and burning states. All the animation isn't my cup of tea in this context, and fortunately someone at Roxio thought it would be a good idea to have a preference to turn it off, which I did. No judgment here, though—some of you out there will like it, and others won't, so I'm not going to hate on something subjective that can be toggled on and off.

Toast 8 also takes the Media Browser and gives it a floating palette of its very own (fig. 3). New to version 8 are a file browser, a DVD browser (which searches unencrypted VIDEO_TS folders either on a disc or stored locally), and a Spotlight search panel, which is really slick. It's nice to be able to track down a bunch of files spread out over your system using Spotlight and add them to a Toast project without actually having to leave the cozy confines of the Toast interface.

Figure 3

The last bit of info on the interface is the "across the room" burning feature. When Toast goes to write out a disc, the main window transforms into a large-ish feedback window which displays the status of your burn (fig. 4). While the animation is kind of cheeseball, the end result is quite effective: an easily-readable status window that can be walked away from and still remains legible from—you guessed it—across the room. Overall, it's a nice touch.

Figure 4

So that's the new interface. Let's get into the more quick-hits section of the review, as I attempt to call out some of the more noteworthy features present in Toast 8.

Video DVD improvements

While Toast isn't going to give you the fancy motion menus the way products like iDVD or DVD Studio Pro do, it's still a decent and solid way to offer basic Video DVDs. In past versions Toast offered a few DVD menu styles, and while that was all well and good, you couldn't customize the offerings without having to attempt to create your own Photoshop-based styles and merge them into Toast's application resources yourself. Though it's still not trivial to create your own menu styles, Toast gives you a few more to play with in version 8 (fig. 5). You also have a few more options than in previous versions, including the ability to drag in your own background image, change the color of the button highlight, and specify a button limit per screen. It's still basic, but at least there's a little more control.

Figure 5

No burn, no problem

I'm still floored at how useful Toast is even if you never want to burn an actual disc. Like Toast 7, you can still batch export audio and video clips directly from Toast, but Toast 8 finally adds a bevy of iPod-specific output settings, including the newfangled 640x480 preset that the latest iPods natively support (fig. 6).

Figure 6

And yes, you can still create disc images in standard ISO format from Toast, but Toast 8 now includes encryption and compression to Mac-only data discs, which, when combined with exporting to an image file, creates standard Mac OS X DMG archives that are both compressed and encrypted (as you may have deduced from the earlier mention of both compression and encryption). I still tend to not burn too many physical discs with Toast, so the added "antiburn" features are most welcome.

Good news for hybrid disc fans

Continuing on the "here's a somewhat obscure feature that old-time geeks like me will enjoy" riff from the previous section, there are also some improvements to Toast's hybrid disc functions. The first addresses one of the most pervasive pet peeves of hybrid disc authors: how to generate that pesky autorun.inf file that enables autolaunching on Windows-based PCs. Before Toast 8, you were on your own. In Toast 8, you can specify a Windows executable to run by default on the PC (fig. 7). What's more, if you've dragged in a custom icon, Toast will even generate a Windows-friendly .ico image which gets displayed on the PC side. What Toast is actually doing is taking this information and creating a customized autorun.inf file for you, effectively ending years of headache for users who have struggled with this particular quirk of dealing with Windows discs.

Figure 7

Another cool feature is the disc image merge function (fig. 8), where you can select a previously made Mac image and smoosh it together with a pre-made Windows image (even those created outside Toast, perhaps on a **gasp** actual PC) to create a hybrid disc with separate content for each platform.

Figure 8

Bust data apart, or try to put it back together

Disc spanning was new to Toast 7 (though I neglected to mention it in the last review), but Toast 8 ups the ante by making spanned discs work on both Macs and Windows machines. If your data is too big to fit on a single CD or DVD, Toast will span the data across however many discs it takes to fit everything onto. When the time comes to grab data off the discs, just pop any of the discs into a Mac or PC, select a file (or the entire disc contents), and the cross-platform Roxio Restore program (fig. 9) will reassemble the data. Toast will usually be able to keep many files intact (depending on their size), meaning that you can also just drag and drop files directly from a spanned disc in addition to using the Roxio Restore utility.

Figure 9

And for those of you who may have a scratched disc (or several), Toast 8 adds a data recovery feature, which, in theory, can rescue data from damaged discs. I say "in theory" because I couldn't get it to work, though in reading other accounts this feature is able to work as advertised in certain situations. There is a fine line between scratched discs that can be read OK anyway, scratched discs that will mount and can't be read by anything, and scratched discs that won't even mount in OS X, and I wasn't able to track down a disc that Toast could do anything with despite repeated attempts. Suffice it to say, I doubt that many of you would purchase or upgrade to Toast 8 based solely on the disc recovery functionality, and even Roxio slaps an enormous "your mileage may vary" disclaimer in the documentation, but it's likely worth a shot if you're having issues—you may end up having some success where I did not.

Slideshows for all

Toast's Photo Disc option may come in handy for those of you who have tons of images strewn about, just begging to be burned to a disc. Just select the Photo Disc option in the Data area, drag in some images, and burn. The result is a cross-platform disc that hooks into features inherent to the host OS to display the images on the disc. On the Mac, the root of the disc contains a mini-app that will invoke the Finder's built-in slideshow feature to show the images. On Windows, Toast burns a simple batch file that shows the disc images in the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Of course, all your pictures are still available in their original format on the disc as well.

Some Jam with your Toast

One of the more welcome additions to Toast 8 (for some, anyway) is the decision to fold in several features previously only available in Roxio's Jam product. Admittedly, the audio part of Toast isn't what floats my particular boat, but I'm finding it pretty cool regardless. Toast, as before, still offers the ability to burn "regular" audio discs (e.g., ones that will play in CD players), MP3 discs, and music DVDs, but those looking for that extra "oomph" will no doubt be enamored with Toast's new bling. Getting tracks into Toast is really simple and slick, as you can drag iTunes playlists directly into Toast, which saves you the tedium of having to rebuild playlists just to burn a disc outside of iTunes. Once your tracks are in the Toast window, you can then add canned or custom crossfades (fig. 10), normalize the volume, add effects, or trim tracks.

Figure 10

Extras, extras, read all about 'em

Toast 8 still ships with a number of external applications that Roxio dubs Extras, and like so many other features, said Extras have also undergone an overhaul from Toast 7. While I have gotten little to no use out of the Extras that shipped prior to Toast 8, that's not the case now. Here are a few thoughts (both positive and negative) on some of the noteworthy things present in the latest set of Toast Extras:

Pseudo-integration. One of the first things that long-time Toast users will notice is the addition of the Extras menu (fig. 11), which is a nice touch even though it doesn't do anything other than launch the chosen Extra. But between this and the cataloging feature we'll look at in a minute, it's good to see at least some measure of integration.

Figure 11

TiVo. The big one for a lot of people, and the one I, regrettably, can't review due to a complete absence of the relevant hardware, is Toast's TiVoToGo functionality, which actually works as a Toast Extra. You have to enable it upon installation (fig. 12), get your keys from the TiVo Web site, and then you can manage and transfer your TiVo recordings (all assuming you have a supported device). There's a decent enough explanation of the process on Roxio's Web site, so that may be worth checking out. I apologize for not being able to test this, but as much as I love you people dearly, I'm not buying a TiVo box just to review a sub-$100 piece of software. Hope you all understand.

Figure 12

Disc cataloging. I absolutely love this new feature, which has been sorely lacking in earlier Toast versions. Basically, Roxio licensed Fujiwara Software's DiscCatalogMaker application, re-branded it as DiscCatalogMaker RE (hereafter DCMRE), and integrated it into Toast (fig. 13). When you go to burn a disc, Toast can add the contents of your discs to the DCMRE catalog, which you can then browse offline at your leisure. If you want to launch a file, you just double-click it in the catalog, you'll be prompted for the correct disc, and the file will launch automatically. DCMRE also will index disc images, so for those of you (like myself) who keep a local disc image of backups for quick access, finding and launching files of yesteryear is incredibly simple.

Figure 13

New labeling software. Discus, the labeling software bundled into Toast 7, has been thankfully replaced with something light years ahead (at least when compared to Discus): Disc Cover RE (or DCRE as I'll be calling it). Again, Roxio has licensed a custom version of an existing program to do some of the dirty work, but DCRE is a marked improvement over Discus. It ships with several presets for both disc labels and the accompanying packaging (fig. 14), or you're more than welcome to roll your own using a blank template.

Figure 14

Not universal? I don't have a lot to say on this one, but Motion Pictures HD, the moving slideshow app that appeared in Toast 7, not only seems to not have been updated at all for Toast 8, but hasn't even been made a Universal Binary. The other Extras in the suite have all been updated to run natively on Intel Macs, so this is a bit of a puzzler. Regardless, Motion Pictures HD was probably the least compelling component of Toast 7, so it doesn't bug me too much to see that it's achieved the rarified air of afterthought status in Toast 8.

Toast Video Player. For those of you familiar with Elgato's incredibly awesome EyeTV 2 software, the new Toast Video Player may elicit a double-take (fig. 15). From what I can tell, Roxio licensed just the playback part of EyeTV from Elgato to aid in playing back clips copied over from TiVo devices, so the resulting player is restricted to only a certain number of file types (MPEG being about the only one I could test). It's likely of limited usefulness, which is a shame, because I love the Elgato player and would enjoy seeing it integrated into Toast as a general media playback option.

Figure 15

The Verdict

Whew! Got all that? I'll add my usual "I probably left something out" disclaimer as a preface here, but as I hope I've shown, there's a ton of new and updated stuff crammed into Toast 8 Titanium. The only thing that really still rubs me the wrong way is the upgrade policy, which Roxio presumably still does because they can get away with it. However, said policy has been tweaked a bit to offer a better deal for upgraders. It works like this: Toast lists for $99.99. Roxio offers a $20 rebate for owners of previous versions, which will knock the price down to $79.99. Either option will get you a full version. However, Roxio now offers a $59.99 upgrade version, which looks for a previous Toast installation (or asks for your previous version serial number) and uses that to validate installation. So it's a little better deal than in the past, though the percentages are still too large for my tastes when it comes to the ratio of original purchase price to upgrade price.

That said, Toast 8 Titanium still earns a Strong Buy rating. As long as Roxio finds new and cool stuff to put into Toast that's worth paying for, I'll suck it up and pay for it. Toast 8 certainly delivers when it comes to bang for the buck, and it really is astounding to see how far Toast has come over the years and how versatile it now is for a variety of user types. Toast 8 Titanium is available now from Roxio's Web site as well as a myriad of online and brick-and-mortar retailers.

Filed under: Review on February 6th, 2007
Tags: Roxio, Toast

^ Top of Page

Got Feedback? to send an email. I'll do my best to answer. Really.