Product Reviews

For those who need more power than is offered by Mac OS X's built-in disc authoring tools, Roxio's Toast Titanium has long been the best authoring alternative.

Fortunately, lack of competition hasn't hindered Toast's progress. The eighth version of this disc-burning application packs a handful of excellent new features, married to a fresh look.

Toast's main window has been redesigned to remove the disk format and settings drawer and the chunky tabs housed at the top of the main window. Now all formats and settings are accessed through a single window, with an animated pane revealing contextual options based on the type of disc you're burning. A more immediate benefit is that the media browser - which links to iLife-based photos, movies and music, as well as other files and folders on your hard disk - is now a floating palette, so it's easier to add files to the content area before you burn a disc.

Toast's most significant new feature is support for the Blu-Ray disc format, allowing you to burn up to 50GB to a single disc. It's a feature made all the more significant by the fact that Mac OS X 10.4 doesn't support Blu-Ray, leaving Toast as the only way to write to Blu-Ray. Its implementation is clever: you can drag and drop files onto a Blu-Ray disc directly from the desktop.

Version 8 adds several new features for audiophiles. When you create audio CDs you can adjust levels, filters and cross-fades for each track. Toast handles this neatly: as you drag music files into the content area, small fade-in and out icons appear next to the first and last tracks, while intervening tracks boast cross-fade icons linked to an adjustment window. The bespoke options feel clunky,

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but the half-dozen built-in fade presets work well.

The ability to enhance sound through 16 filters makes Toast generally a far better way to create audio CDs than iTunes, but there's one caveat: we couldn't burn songs purchased from the iTunes Store. Hardly Toast's fault, but enough to limit its appeal.

Toast's backup features have been significantly boosted. While the previous version of Toast could split large files across multiple discs, it was hindered by the fact that you could only restore files on a Mac. Now, Toast embeds cross-platform restore software on every disc of a burned set, so you can rebuild the file even on a PC.

Another nice touch is that when copying data discs, Toast offers a data-recovery mode - a simple checkbox - to grab files off scratched or otherwise damaged discs. While it couldn't recover directly damaged files, it could extract undamaged files from discs that Mac OS X refused to mount.

Toast also incorporates the full features of Roxio's DVD compression and extraction utility, Popcorn 2. Its conversion features may be less polished than those offered by dedicated DVD conversion tools, but we found them supremely easy to use: just put the DVD into your Mac, and select an output format in Toast; you can now export easily to iPod, PSP and mobile phones, among others.

The Toast suite comprises additional, standalone applications. In Toast 8, these include a much-improved disc-labelling tool; a slideshow program; Motion Pictures HD, which rivals iPhoto in its range of features; and DiscCatalogMaker, a new cataloguing program. By default, Toast 8 now indexes data discs as you burn them, and you can search indexes through a Finder-like window in DiscCatalogMaker, where you can also scan and batch-scan CDs.

Not everything is perfect; we're still perplexed by occasional inconsistencies between suite elements. For example, Motion Pictures still offers drawer, rather than palette, access to iLife media. At least the applications are more integrated in other ways: Toast 8 now includes a menu link to the other applications in the suite.

Toast 8's Blu-Ray support makes it an essential upgrade for anyone with a suitable drive, but when you consider its features, Toast 8 amounts to a bargain for anyone.