Review: Toast 4 Deluxe

By: Brent Hecht
Available at the Applelinks Store

In the early 90s, personal CD recorders were non-existent. In order to run a CD burning operation, one needed a clean room and equipment that cost over $30,000. Times have changed, however. Personal CD recorders can now be found for under $130 and the resulting CD recording craze is growing exponentially. PC users have had many full-featured CD recording software packages available to them for a while now. The Macintosh community, on the other hand, has had only several choices, all of which were lacking in features compared to their PC counterparts. With Toast 4 Deluxe, Adaptec aims to bridge this feature gap and provide Mac users with some long desired features. But does Toast 4 Deluxe meet Adaptec's lofty claims?

When was the last time you bought something that didn't require you to spend extra money to use all of its features? A Walkman? Batteries not included. How about your new iBook? You need 32MB more RAM. Antivirus software? You need to pay a monthly fee for virus updates. Toast Deluxe 4.0 takes this concept of hidden costs and throws it in the trash. Inside Toast's shrink-wrapped box is everything (and I mean everything) you need to begin your CD burning activities. In addition to a manual and other documentation, Adaptec includes a CD labeler to make your burned CDs look professional, professional paper for the labeler, and even an audio cable for transferring music from your records and tapes to CDs.

So you're probably saying "Enough with the extras... What CD burning capabilities does Toast 4 Deluxe give me and how well do they work? The answers to these questions are "tons" and "great." Toast 4 Deluxe sports support for nearly every single CD format in existence, from standard audio CDs to Mac volumes to video CDs. Granted, some formats that Toast supports require some knowledge in multimedia mastering, but luckily, Toast's printed manual provides nearly all information needed. On the quality front, Toast 4 Deluxe passed all my tests; it was always successful in burning me a workable CD, provided I followed the instructions.

Much of the emphasis in version 4.0 of Toast Deluxe is its MP3 and audio burning capabilities. New features include support for the CDDB database and direct burning of MP3s. While these features work without a hitch, they are not as useful as Adaptec claims them to be, as they mostly serve to eliminate a step or two in the audio CD creation process.

In addition to Toast 4 Deluxe's CD burning and audio capabilities, Adaptec also provides two software utilities that aim to make two of the most common applications of CD burning much easier. The PhotoRelay application allows users to organize multimedia and burn "catalogs" onto a CD. Anyone who deals with photos and digital video on a daily basis will find this software extremely useful. The other included utility, CDSpinDoctor, is not as refined as PhotoRelay, but still serves its purpose: to transfer audio from a tape or record to a CD. One major caveat, however. CDSpinDoctor won't run with virtual memory enabled, which is completely unacceptable these days.

Toast 4 Deluxe also adds support for IDE/ATAPI/EIDE, USB, and Firewire CD-R and CD-RW drives. Support for these drives should provide Mac users with cheaper and more compatible CD recording options.

Toast 4 Deluxe is the Swiss army knife of Mac CD recording. It offers pretty much every CD recording feature in existence and is competitive with the best CD recording applications in the PC world. While some of the added features are not as stellar as the existing ones, they still prove somewhat useful. If you own a Mac and a CD-R or CD-RW drive, buy this software. Believe me, you'll wonder what you did without it.

Available at the Applelinks Store

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March 21, 2010