Roxio Toast 10 Titanium

In what has become something of a Macworld tradition, Roxio once again used the annual gathering of Apple faithful as the backdrop for the unveiling of version 10 of its stalwart Toast Titanium media management product. As in past years, more features have been added and the upgrade price is still terrible, but this year there's a new wrinkle. Let's dive in to see what's changed this time around.

Before we get into it...

It's continually amazing to me that a product like Toast, originally created to write data to those newfangled CD ROM doohickeys back in the 90s, continues to reinvent itself for the post physical media age. In other words, if CD/DVD burning was taking a back seat in earlier versions, it's pretty much in the trunk now. Sure, we now have a new disc format to deal with -- Blu-ray (or BD), which is wisely a paid add-on in Toast -- but with the explosive growth of networked media which never leaves a hard drive, it's good to see Toast being adept with established and emerging formats alike.

Now, the last version of Toast I reviewed was Toast 8 Titanium two years ago, which means (gasp!) I actually jumped off the upgrade treadmill for a version. In the case of Toast, when new versions come fast and furious, it's highly likely that many of you may have done the same thing, as Roxio's additions from version to version may not represent a compelling reason to upgrade each and every time (especially when you consider the continuation of Toast's strange upgrade pricing, which we'll get into later).

The last thing I'll mention before getting into the new features is that, as with prior versions, there are some features I just can't test. TiVo integration, for example, is improved in Toast 10, but I don't have TiVo. Ditto for an AVCHD camera, even though that's a huge feature here. So while I'll mention all the notable new and improved features, not everything will have been experienced firsthand by your humble reviewer.

Toast goes Pro

Long-time Toast users are well aware of the fact that Toast has traditionally offered a suite of add-on programs which ship with the product (with version 10 being no exception), but the folks at Roxio have upped the ante this time around. For the first time, Toast now comes in two distinct versions: Standard (as I'll call it) and Pro. The Pro version, which fetches a $50 premium over the regular version, isn't so much an expanded version of Toast as much as it is a Toast bundle, adding a handful of select programs chosen to help you get more out of your media. As each of these additional programs are pre-existing, fully standalone products, I'm not going to review each one individually here; however, the HD/BD plug-in is worth a quick rundown and a brief comment. Since Blu-ray players and burners aren't exactly legion on the Mac, Roxio is wisely offering the HD/BD plug-in as a $20 individual add-on in addition to bundling it in with the Pro version. What's notable here, other than the obvious ability to author Blu-ray video discs, is that you can burn video to regular or dual-layer DVDs and play them back on Blu-ray players -- no expensive Blu-ray burner or media necessary. This hearkens back to the days when you could burn DVD-Video to standard CD ROMs, which provided up to TEN FULL MINUTES of DVD-quality video on a single disc! Times have changed just a little bit.

Anyway, the bundled third-party apps in Toast 10 Pro include, briefly:

• SoundSoap - This utility analyzes audio clips and tracks for noise and removes it.
• Sonicfire Pro - A soundtrack maker. Those familiar with Soundbooth's scores will get the gist right away.
• FotoMagico - Slideshow program.
• LightZone - A really nice program for intelligent photo adjustments.

As with any bundle, you're going to have to decide for yourself if the extra $50 is worth the cost. If even two of the items in the Pro version will provide value to you or fill a workflow need not covered by other programs in your arsenal, you'll likely get your money's worth. I will say that, in general, Roxio has partnered with some quality software vendors to add a lot of value to the core Toast product, but value doesn't mean much if you don't need the specific features the bundle provides. Let's move on to Toast proper, which is why we're all really here today.

The Stuff I Could Test

Since it's the first thing one usually sees after launching a program, I suppose it makes sense to discuss the interface first. It's not a huge overhaul from where I last saw it in Toast 8, but it's clear Roxio puts a lot of thought into the interface as the product evolves. Toast 10 streamlines things a bit more, offering the same categorized and tabbed panels mixed with slightly bigger and more legible fonts this time around (fig. 1).

Figure 1

Beside the main window is the familiar Media Browser, which now sports a few neat tricks in version 10. For one, your AVCHD camera will now show up in the Media Browser, which sounds nice, but as I don't have the requisite equipment in this case, I can't attest to how well it works (more on that later). The other big addition, which I could test, is the ability to have Web video show up in the Media Browser. I'm not sure this is entirely legal, but Roxio seems to think it is, so we'll go with it. It works like this: fire up Toast, head over to a streaming site like YouTube, start a clip, and it will show up in Toast's Media Browser (fig. 2) once it has streamed the entire clip to your cache (whether you've watched the whole thing or not). Flash Video sites like YouTube and Vimeo work fine; The Apple trailer site, for example, doesn't work. It may be hit or miss, but if you just have to have The Evolution of Dance or Miss Teen South Carolina talking about "The Iraq" preserved for all posterity on a DVD, this will be a useful feature.

Figure 2

Speaking of DVDs, there are a couple new features of note in Toast 10. For one, Toast 10 now includes a host of new DVD menus, all of which are available in both 4x3 and 16x9 format (fig. 3). We're still talking basic still menus here -- no motion, no video, no fanciness. I have no complaints about the lack of bling here, as motion menus in DVDs have long since worn off as a novelty in my book, but what I will whine about is the continued inability to easily create your own menu themes for use in Toast. I've done a bit of hacking into the Photoshop-based format Toast uses for its DVD menus, and while it's not for the faint of heart, Roxio could create a thriving menu sharing community simply by publishing the specs and providing a little bit of Web space for potential menu makers. I've mentioned this specific idea to Roxio folks during a briefing, and I'm hoping for some kind of movement in this direction. It's long past time to make it at least a little easier for folks to roll their own menus, unless new menus are being specifically saved as features in the yearly revision.

Figure 3

Another DVD-centric feature is the ability to extract short segments from unprotected DVDs or VIDEO_TS folders. It's pretty easy: drag a VIDEO_TS folder (either from a DVD or one on your hard drive) to the Video Files section of Toast's Convert tab, hit the Extract button on the clip you wish to grab, and you'll be presented with an editing environment that users of ElGato's EyeTV will find most familiar (fig. 4). From there, it's a matter of setting some edit points, sending the changes back to Toast, and pressing the big red button to convert the clip to any of the number of video formats Toast supports.

Figure 4

A streaming-related update to Toast 10 is the addition of a native iPhone application for Streamer, which, unfortunately, remains unapproved by Apple at the time of this writing. Roxio unveiled the Streamer service in Toast 9 (so it's new to me), pairing a standalone app with a server on your Mac to stream videos over your local Bonjour network or over the Internet. The latter is accomplished though Roxio's Streamer site, and all it takes is pointing your browser to http://streamer.roxio.com/<username>, where username is a short name you pick when configuring the service. I tried videos both ways, and it works well even through my iPhone's mobile Safari browser. The native iPhone app promises even smoother playback and a nicer interface, which I'm looking forward to seeing when Apple gets around to approving the app for distribution through the iPhone App Store. In any case, my experience with Streamer was a pretty good one even without the native iPhone app.

My experience was not so nice, however, with another of Toast's Extras: CD Spin Doctor. Specifically, I had no end of troubles with its new audio capture features. Ideally, you're supposed to be able to fire up any audio source (such as line-in sources or, more notably, Internet radio), and through a single click of a button, CD Spin Doctor will capture the audio, detect breaks, "fingerprint" the content, automatically split and tag any tracks it finds, and add the individual tracks to your iTunes library once you stop capturing. I tried this feature with a few streaming stations as well as Pandora, and while the program successfully managed to identify many of the tracks it encountered, the final tracks I was left with were split incorrectly, and, even worse, none of them were the actual length of the song. So while this feature has a lot of potential, it definitely needs some massaging before I'd let it go to work on important content by itself. The pain continued, however: the capture driver it installed on my system caused a kernel panic (but was OK after the reboot), which, shall we say, irked me. I also found it annoying that volume controls are inaccessible during capture (which makes sense), but remained so even after quitting the program. I had to restart CD Spin Doctor to regain control of the volume, which isn't a showstopper but is nonetheless annoying. So while I never got much use out of CD Spin Doctor in past Toast versions, the bugginess of the new features will ensure that I won't get much use out of this version either.

A Toast Extra I can get completely behind, however, is Disc Catalog RE. I've gotten so much use out of this little program over the years it's ridiculous. When you generate a lot of backups of a lot of projects, having a way to automatically catalog backup images as you make them is wonderful. DCRE also makes it easy to scan and catalog any discs or disc images you might have lying around, for a truly simple way of finding just about anything you have on any backup without having to have the media mounted. While the new version that ships with Toast 10 doesn't change a whole lot, it does add thumbnail previews of your images and/or music and movie files for display via CoverFlow as you browse your backups (fig. 5). I did have to scan all of my disc images again to generate the thumbnails, which didn't take long, but did balloon my catalog file from 4 MB to almost 400 MB. You can set the program to not generate thumbnails, but disk space is so plentiful these days it's worth the extra megabytage (to butcher a word) to have media thumbnails at your disposal.

Figure 5

The last Extra I'll give a shout out to is the Get Backup RE program, which was introduced in Toast 9, but now has bi-directional syncing in Toast 10 (fig. 6). In a nutshell, Get Backup RE lets you backup things like your Address Book, iTunes Folder, and iPhoto Library, in addition to whatever files and folders you'd like to have a copy of. This is a step above your standard Time Machine backup, as you can pick specific items to back up on the schedule of your choice. In general, it's a nice little utility that has some decent features, assuming you don't already have a backup strategy in place (you do have a backup strategy, don't you?).

Figure 6

The Stuff I Couldn't Test

As I mentioned earlier, I wasn't able to test every new feature, owing mostly to not having a specific gadget or technology handy. Such is life, and with a program that covers such a wide swath of media types, I'm quite sure I'd be bankrupt if I had actually purchased every piece of gear that a such complete and comprehensive review would dictate. Since I would like to continue to do things like pay my mortgage and clothe and feed my family, I'm relegated to passing along descriptions of features I did not test:

• Bi-directional TiVo streaming. Earlier Toast versions let you stream content recorded on your TiVo to your Mac; Toast 10 completes the round trip by letting you stream movies from your Mac for playback on your TiVo.
• AVCHD Archiving. Toast 10 has the ability to back up your AVCHD camera to Blu-ray discs, while retaining a local preview version for quick access.
• Audiobook conversion. This would have probably been the least expensive of the "technology I do not have" items to test, but alas, I have no audiobooks to convert, so this gets lumped in with everything else. In any event, Toast 10 will read in audiobooks on CD and combine the entire title into a single iPod-compatible .m4b file.

The Verdict

I've gotten quite wordy as it is just talking about the new and improved features, which necessarily means that I haven't really gotten into the legacy stuff (like basic CD and DVD burning -- how quaint!) that Toast has done well since the mid-1990s. Of course, I invite you to take a stroll down memory lane with past Toast reviews if you're really curious (Toast 7 is here; Toast 8 is here), but suffice it to say that there is a whole lot of value packed into every new purchase of Toast. Toast could very easily have been relegated to the dustbin of history by now, as media goes increasingly disc-less, but each version brings new features that seem to keep Toast relevant for another year -- which is probably why we see full version updates on such an accelerated schedule. So if we're talking Toast as a new purchase, Toast 10 Titanium earns its customary Strong Buy rating. $99.99 is a pretty good deal for all the stuff Toast includes, and if your needs intersect with the product in the Toast Pro bundle, the $149.99 price point is pretty good there too.

However, the picture gets fuzzy when upgrading from a previous version. Toast still has what I consider to be a terrible upgrade policy, as Roxio only offers a $20 rebate on the full version price for previous version owners. So the question becomes whether this year's version of Toast offers enough value over whatever version you may already have to warrant plunking down $79.99. I suspect the answer might be "no" for a great many recent Toast purchasers, unless you just happen to have a new gadget or Blu-ray burner or whatever else this version of Toast just happens to add specific features for. In my case, Toast 7 to Toast 8 provided some good new features, so I happily pulled the trigger on that, but I skipped Toast 9 because it didn't offer anything I had to have. And while Toast 10, on balance, is packed with good stuff, I don't think even moving up from Toast 8 would provide enough value for a token $20 off the retail price. Were Roxio to start charging in the $20-$30 range for year-to-year Toast upgrades, I'd make the leap each and every time. So with all that said, I have to give Toast 10 a Neutral rating as an upgrade product, owing mostly to the longstanding upgrade policy which minimizes the importance of new features and provides a disincentive to upgrade.

Even with the split rating, I still consider Toast to be a feature-packed and solid product which I continue to turn to often, even though I may not always have the latest and greatest version every single year. In any event, Toast 10 Titanium is shipping now, and is priced at $99.99 for the standard version and $149.99 for the new Pro bundle, with that previously mentioned $20 rebate offered on both products for users of other Sonic/Roxio media programs. For more details, visit Roxio's Web site.

Filed under: Review on February 2nd, 2009
Tags: Roxio, Toast

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