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Provides: CD/DVD creation along with copying, preparation of content for CD/DVD and now iPad, iPhone, iPod, etc..
Developer: Roxio
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5 or greater, Intel (with 1 GB RAM (2 recommended)), 1 GB of space (up to 5 GB of space Pro version), CD,DVD, and/or Blu-ray recording device. [Note: you are only limited by what you do not have. That is, if you do not have a Blu-ray recording device, you cannot do Blu-ray recording, etc.]
Premium Retail Price: $99.99 for standard version, $149.99 for Pro version and a $20 rebate from Roxio can be used for either product. For updates, the prices are $59.99 and $99.99 respectively. The Blu-ray Plugin is $20 with Toast 10, but included with Toast 10 Pro.

Ever since the Mac had a CD tray, it could burn CDs all by itself and didn't require anything else to do that. Around the same time, Toast was there to help you do it better. Now, years later, nothing has really changed: your Mac can still burn CDs and DVDs, and Toast 11 can burn either of them (as well as Blu-ray disks) and do a lot more, and it still does a better job of the basic function: burning disks. It's pretty straightforward, but if you want subtleties, that's harder to do, and that's where Toast can help. And, if you want to enhance your video's sound, Toast now provides an amazing range of options. I have to add that while there are a number of significant improvements, I also find that at least one change provided a bit of a step backwards in user assistance.

Roxio's latest version of Toast, boasts a new installer engine (which resolves a big annoyance when it comes to updating), but perhaps more important provides multiple burner support (burn more than one disk at a time), basic (to significant) editing of video from within Toast, maintain movie subtitles,save your videos to social media sites, and a hole lot more. Also new are built-in tutorials directly from the opening window's assistant. One mechanism that Toast is using to demonstrate that this release is different than the last is that the icon for Toast not only shows a CD disk being toasted, but there's also a large iPhone (or is that a small iPad) in that toaster.

As before, the standard release of Toast 11 comes with Disk Cover (for printing CD/DVD disks and boxes), DiskCatalogMaker (for generating a database of all of the things you've burnt), TiVo Transfer and Mac2TiVo (for putting content from your TiVo to your Mac or vise versa), and Spin Doctor, for moving your vinal albums over to iTunes and your iPod. Gone is Streamer, sadly, no loss. If you chose to up your purchase to Toast 11 Pro (an extra $50), you also get Photoshop Elements 9 (see my review) to help you fix your images as well as create image montages, Sonicfire Pro 5 to help provide royalty free music to your videos (good idea if you plan on uploading your videos to YouTube), and SoundSoap 2 to do a better job of cleaning your vinal records or any other audio media you might have.

When you first start Toast, you are now greeted with a new window called the Toast Assistant. It's a curious in-between zone where you can see stuff and set up stuff to do, but you can't DO anything there in particular. As shown below, when you first see the Assistant, you can see videos or look at PDFs on how to use Toast. The introductory video is already installed with Toast, subsequent videos will need to be downloaded.

If you now click on one of the option tabs for Toast, such as Data, Audio, etc., you can see below a large button displaying the various options for that tab. Here there are actually two options as the default view is the "View Common Projects" from a dropdown menu seen in the upper right or by mousing down on this you can "View Advanced Projects."

There are several curious things about the Assistant, the first one is that when it is open, you can't do anything. In fact, all of the menus are greyed out. You cannot access Preferences, Open, Help, nothing. The second curious thing is that when you either double-click one of the options or click once on an option to select it and then click the Finish button on the bottom right corner, you then enter the "real" Toast where you actually set things up to be processed in the application. So, for the most part, the Assistant is simply a way station to select what you want to do but is unable to do anything itself.

At a minimum, the Assistant does provide access to the tutorials and some info about what the various toasting options are for. This is more than is shown/displayed on the main application window as shown below. Just as the Assistant, the option tabs of Data, Audio, Video, Copy, and Convert look no different in either. The primary difference is the sub-options are a pull-down menu in the application and provide no information as to what's what.

Thus, the apparent value of the Assistant is if you are new to burning CDs and/or the specific type of new operation you are attempting, than the brief explanation provide by the Assistant will be an assistance.

On the other hand, aside from the tutorials, the Assistant doesn't provide any information that wasn't available from the main window from Toast 10. As shown below in the top screenshot from Toast 10 you see a tool tip when you place the mouse over the "i." The middle image is what you see in the Assistant for the same selection. Notice that text is exactly the same. In the bottom image is what you see in the dropdown menu in the Main window of Toast 11. That means if you need a reminder about what a particular action is/does, you need to see what the Assistant provides. But since you can't do anything in the Assistant, you need to go into the Main Toast window. but if you see something else you want to check on, you need to slip back to the Assistant. Keep in mind that Toast's window and the Assistant are mutually exclusive and like matter and antimatter cannot exist together at the same time. So, if you are not completely sure what the various options are, Toast 10 was more efficient than Toast 11.

If you do not need to see the Assistant, simply click off the checkbox next to "Show this window when Toast opens." If you later change your mind and/or want to check out a video tutorial, you can get the Assistant back from the File menu "New from Assistant."

Normally I don't talk about installers but with Toast I should. In the past, you either downloaded a monster download from the internet or dragged a large file from a CD and after double-clicking the Toast application, the final links between Toast and your system was generated. Part of the issue was when there was an update to Toast. What the user had to do was to download EVERYTHING with the updated Toast. By everything, I mean everything: Disk Cover; DiskCatalogMaker; TiVo Transfer; Mac2TiVo; Get Backup; and Spin Doctor all had be re-downloaded whether there was an update for them or not.

Now, there is a formal installer for the whole package and that provides Roxio the ability to selectively upload individual packages for updating as needed. Thus, when there was the update 11.0.2, one only needed to update 81 MB of data as opposed to the 400 MB of the entire (original) package. Since this is Toast 11, all I can say is "what took these guys so long"?

One major improvement with Toast 11 is the range of editing abilities now built into the application. In the series of images below, the very top image displays the option available for Editing a Video file in Toast 10: you had three options: Good, Better, Best. (I'll get back to the Menu Style in a minute.) Then notice in the subsequent images the range of options available for Toast 11.

If you look at the top image above and the 3rd image down, both are displaying how your video disk will be displayed. Toast 10 has a microscopic thumbnail while the Toast 11 thumbnail is small. Neither really provides a good idea of how the Menu Style will appear. Both have a magnifying glass next to the small image and both zoom in about the same amount. The problem here is that to really see a style before selecting which style you may want to use, you need to select a style, zoom in, close, select, zoom in, close, etc. It would be nice if they had a previous "<" and next ">" option so that you didn't have to zoom in and out and in and out and still be able to review the various options.

If your video's sound needs adjustment, welcome to Toast 11. Get ready for a treat. Below is a screen shot of the many types of sound enhancement and the workboard for distortion (different sound corrections have different options). There's nothing like this in Toast 10.

Another area of extreme improvement is Toast's convert options. Below is a screenshot with the options that Toast 10 provided on the left and Toast 11's options on the right.

The one area that Toast hasn't improved is the step-by-step process to do these conversions. As the process is now (and always has been) Let's say you want to convert a .mov file into H.264 file. As shown in the screenshot below, there's only so much you can do within this Toast window:

• You drop the file you want to convert into Toast.
• You do any editing (and now with Toast 11 you can do significantly more editing).
• As you look around, there's no place to establish what format you want to convert the file into. You check to make sure you are in the Convert tab (you are), you look around in the menus (nothing there), you look in the side panel called "Options," nope, nothing there either. Media doesn't help either. You do the only thing left, you click the bright red "Convert" button.

Now, the window shrinks down as the Toast window always does just before it starts it's processing, but wait, it stops and a curtain drops down from the top window strip providing a few more options, the top one here let's you set the final device option (this is shown in the screenshot below). The 2nd option is to set the quality and the 3rd option is where do you want to save the file.

I have always found this procedure confusing and strangely backwards. Currently it's (1) This is what I have, (2) Now convert it, (3) Oh, and by the way, this is what I want you to convert it into. It should be (1) This is what I have, (2) This is what I want to do with it, (3) now do it. Why Toast doesn't let you set EVERYTHING up and then click the Convert Button, I do not know.

Before I leave this window, let me point out one more new feature: "Schedule..." seen in the bottom left of the screenshot above. This lets you schedule when you want this/these files to be process such as when you are asleep or at work. If you have long files or many files this can take a while.

If you've done any video conversions, you know the time it can take to process the file into the new/different codec. IF your Mac uses a Nvidia Graphic card (many do), Toast can now leverage that hardware to help the processing and cut the total time down. If you do not have a Nvidia graphic card than this feature is irrelevant to you. [If you do not know what kind of video card you have, go to your Apple menu and select "About this Mac." Then click on the "More Info..." button on the bottom of that small window. This opens your "System Profiler." In the hardware region look for "Graphics/Displays." This will show you what kind of Graphic hardware your computer has.]

Other features of note include "Spanning," used when you've selected more content than can fit on a single disk. That content can be data, audio, or video. You can select an option so that files are not supposed to be cut into pieces (if at all possible).

Following one of the original features developed by the Mac, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), Toast now displays previews that are as good as the files. That is, if you have generated a HD video, you will see a preview that is HD, not SD. As I often state, it's the little things...

And before I leave it out, if you have multiple disk burners, you can have them all burning away with Toast's multiple burner support.

The additional files that come with Toast Titanium let you print out the label for your CDs or DVDs or Blu-ray disks and the covers for the containing box. If you want to back up the data on your computer onto DVDs or CDs you can use "Get Back Up 2." And, if you are like me and still have too many vinal records, than the latest version of Spin Doctor will help you convert them into sound files that you can move to iTunes. [Note: sometime back I created a step-by-step process for how to use this application. You can read it here. While there have been some changes, it's mostly still accurate.]

If you opt an extra $50 for the Pro version you also get the full version of Photoshop Elements 9, the latest release; PhotoMagico 3 RE, create slide shows of your digital images that will bring life into the presentation; BIAS SoundSoap™ 2 SE, to clean up any noise, popping, hissing, or other sounds that shouldn't be coming from your sound files; and lastly SmartSound Sonicfire™ Pro 5, this lets you select royalty free sound tracks for your video files. [Note: there are some small fees involved when obtaining the music.] When showing your home movies exclusively in your home, you can pretty much use whatever sound recordings you want, but when you place things on the web you need to be more careful. This let you avoid the issue entirely so you can place your videos anywhere with no concern that you'll get a tap on the shoulder. Also with the Pro version is the plugin to burn Blu-ray disks (you will need to purchase a Blu-ray burner to use this, Macs cannot burn Blu-ray disks by default).

In short, this is a great update with many exciting new features. The new features do an excellent job of filling in holes from previous releases of Toast that developed as technology advances. As stated early in the review, the Toast icon now shows either a large iPhone (or iPod) or a small iPad. Whichever is not important, but in reality, if you have one of these devices, when was the last time you burnt a CD/DVD for music or video? Chances are your media went right into your device. It was either that or it was uploaded to Flicker or YouTube.

My only complaints are that I find the Toast Assistant, mostly irrelevant: sort of like when you go to a website that the home page that lets you know you've gotten to the website you wanted and now you have to click on a button to get into the website you've just gotten to. Like I said, there is a checkbox to avoid the Assistant. I would also love to see Toast have a more logical procedure for converting media.

Otherwise, this is a great new release of Toast and if you do any of the things that it can do, and want to do it better, you'd be wise to add it to your application arsenal.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.