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.

Pairing the range of features and capabilities of any application down to a core feature set is a challenge. To make that application easier to use is a separate challenge in itself. Adobe does a great job in shrinking one of these two applications down to size so that the hobbyist can take advantage of what the parent applications have to offer. This release of Elements 9 brings two new applications to the Mac market: Premier (the video application) and Organizer (the content explorer application). Both of these two are not new and are both well seasoned applications. What's new is that they are now available for the Mac. I find Photoshop Elements both powerful and easy to use, Premier Elements is very powerful and a great step up from iMovie, but with a very steep learning curve. If you are used to using Bridge, Organizer is a bit frustrating, but it has a lot of to offer, just in different ways.

Photomatix 4 continues its domination of the HDR Photography landscape with its new release of version 4. The big news is that hdrsoft has now provided an excellent mechanism to deal with objects that have moved during your multiple-image capture. In addition, Photomatix now displays a sample strip of thumbnails to let you quickly see and click to display your image in a variety of presets prvoided by Photomatix (you can also create your own). These presets let you easily view an image with either Image Fusion or Tone Mapping to help you determine which approach might give you a better look for your image.

Once you start "shooting raw," you'll never go back. And once you start working with ACR 6.1, you won't want to go back to earlier versions. Yes, it's that good. From Lens Profile Corrections to the new Noise elimination tools, to the enhanced Post Crop Vignetting and new Grain feature, this is a powerful update. ACR and Photoshop provide an image-working duo that creates a wealth of photo-manipulation, enhancement, and control. Even if you are using ACR on JPEG images, you will find increased functionality at the initial stages of image correction/enhancement that will carry through to the end of the process.

The task is truly daunting: the release of eighteen major applications along with a wide peripheral collection of many supporting applications, web-based applications, Flash-based applications, and associated shared resource applications. To release any one of these is a big task, to release them all, on the same day is, well, either risky or reckless. To be successful at it is amazing. To do it 5 times in a row, is battling luck. But if Pixar can be successful time after time, why not Adobe? And they have. The range of product improvements in Creative Suite 5 goes from subtle and cool to drop-down amazing.

All three of these books—Creative Composition, Creative Close-Ups and Creative Night—are good. If looking at great photographs and seeing their EXIF data is enough for you, all of them will serve you well. What the first two books seemed to have lacked was someone doing a final proofread and suggesting to Davis, "Hey, why doesn't this have a sample? Why are there no photos of the Equipment, you could be saving thousands of words here? Why isn't there a reference in the book to this information found at the end of the book." You know, things like that. And it's a pity, because otherwise these are all stellar books.

I'm sorry, but these suckers are cute. Arriving in a pill-like form, the Chill Pill Audio Speakers are small, easily portable speakers that can plug into any device with a standard 1/8" plug. They give good (not great) sound, but considering their size, it's completely adequate. So, when you are traveling and want to listen to your music or Podcasts without having to limit yourself to buds or headphones, plug your Chill Pill into your iPod and you will be satisfied.

Ever since the mouse became a pointing device, one of the more common problems was locating the mouse's cursor on the screen if you didn't already know where it was. So, you wiggle the mouse around hoping to see a wiggling thing somewhere out of the corner of your eye, and eventually, ah, there it is. That's a bit annoying, but is not frustrating. What is frustrating is when you are watching a demonstration and the presenter is moving his mouse all around the screen explaining this or that, and you can't follow what he is saying because you do not know where the mouse is. Well, that presenter is not using Mouseposé.

It's been a year-and-a-half since I reviewed Elgato's Turbo.264 video conversion accelerator, and a lot has happened since then. The most obvious, judging from the title of Elgato's new Turbo.264 HD Video Encoder & Accelerator is the worldwide love shown for high definition video. The kids these days are all about their high def cable and their high def camcorders and their high def leopard (as in Snow Leopard), and Elgato's not about to be left behind.

Why purchase a product to duplicate what the Mac Operating System can already do (and do for free)? Simply put, if you can get all your needs from what is already in the OS, there is no reason. But if you want more than what is provided by the Mac OS, a good place to start is with Roxio's Toast 10 Titanium. Both the Standard and Pro versions provide the user a package of tools to make the stuff that you want to burn, better. So, rather than just burning your images, you can improve them and create a great slide show. Rather than just copy your old albums to iTunes, you can improve their sound before burning them. And, as long as you are creating DVDs of your families vacation, why not also add some music that's digital-rights free. It's all there in Toast.

About 25-30 years ago, I had a small boombox that had "Wide" button which offered a fuller, deeper sound that didn't have the dynamics of stereo; it was much larger than stereo. I immediately thought about that wide button as soon as I started up AstoundStereo for the first time. This program will improve the audio coming out of any application on your Mac: iTunes, iMovie, Quicktime files, Flash files, the web, anything that produces audio. Once started, you can forget it, but you won't forget the sound.

The promise of personal re-creation of a music experience is the long-sought holy grail for both listeners and those who want to provide the tools to listen to that experience. Those hopes took a big step closer with the release of the Westone 3 true-fit earphones. Providing three separate sound generating devices contained within each earphone (one for bass, one for mid tones, and one for treble sounds) all balanced for an amazing sound experience. The Westone 3 provides a strong case for being in the concert, or at least feeling like you are.