Revew: Toast 5 Titanium

Product:		Toast 5 Titanium
Manufacturer:		Roxio (formerly Adaptec)
Price:		$99.99 (suggested retail)
Review by:		Marc Zeedar

Available at the Applelinks Store

Did you get a copy of Toast with your CD writer? Consider it a demo. Toast 5 Titanium is the real thing.

Titanium is Roxio's gimmicky name for the professional version of their best-selling CD burning software. It's a major upgrade, however, incorporating the features of the previous Toast 4 Pro and Toast DVD. That's right: Titanium lets you burn DVDs!

Of course just because the software supports a feature doesn't mean you have the hardware required. You'll need a new Superdrive capable of writing to DVD media. Also, while Toast Ti will burn a DVD, it won't create the necessary DVD-format files. You'll need Apple's iDVD or iDVD Pro for that. I wish Roxio would post that information clearly on their product box and website -- they make it sound as though Toast Titanium is all you need.

Toast Titanium includes a new "Titanium" interface. The new interface doesn't help or hinder your CD burning capability. Frankly, burning CDs couldn't be much easier. You simply click a format button -- data, audio, or CD copy -- drag files to the Toast window, and click the burn button. The "Other" menu shown below includes formats you'll use less often.

The length of the burn process is entirely hardware dependent. My 12x CD writer burns a full disc in about six minutes. A slower 4x drive takes twenty. The good news is that Toast Titanium supports burning in the background. You can now use your Mac while writing a CD! (Just be careful you don't modify the files you are copying: according to Roxio it won't necessarily hurt the burn, but it will cause the verify to fail.)

As I don't have a DVD burner, I was interested in another technology Roxio included: the ability to burn Video-CDs. If you aren't familiar with the Video-CD format, it's a video format based on standard CD technology. Most computers and many DVD players will play Video-CDs. The quality isn't as high as DVD -- on par with a VHS videocassette -- and a disc holds a maximum of 70 minutes of video.

Toast Titanium will not only burn discs in Video-CD format, it will convert your QuickTime movies to the required MPEG format. The conversion process takes some time (dependant on your Mac's processing speed), but the quality is high. The Video-CD burns at the maximum rate of your drive.

The Toast Titanium manual warns that DVD players are often picky about reading CDR media, and that proved correct. I had to try several brands before I found one that my player would recognize: CDRW media worked best. (Roxio recommends burning Video-CDs on several media types and taking them to the store when purchasing a DVD player so you can make sure it works with your discs.)

Once I'd gotten a disc my DVD player would read, it worked like a charm. Unlike a DVD there is no on-screen menu: you simply advance through movie tracks by pressing the track advance button on your DVD remote. Pause, fast forward, etc. all worked as expected.

For the Video-CD I burned, I used the sample MPEG files included on the Toast Titanium bonus CD. These were short movies from Atom Films and were pretty cool.

Toast Titanium actually comes with -- gasp! -- a printed manual. It's very good, explaining the basics about CD writing, if you're not familiar with the process, and advanced information as well. It's divided into chapters on each CD format, so if you just want to figure out how to burn a particular kind of CD (such as audio or cross-platform), just jump to that section are read all about it. I really like the way the manual explained the potential problems and limitations with each format, warning you about issues to watch out for.

Another unique aspect of Toast Titanium is that it supports DVD-RAM media. My PowerMac G4 includes a DVD-RAM drive, though I haven't used it much. (DVD-RAM media is different from regular DVD movie media.) When Toast burns to a DVD-RAM disk it treats it like a giant CD. It reformats it and writes the disk all at once, so you can't add information to it without reformatting it (it shows up as a locked disk in the Finder). Writing to DVD-RAM tends to be a painfully slow process and Toast didn't make it seem that much faster, though I didn't do any comparison tests. Writing 1.4GB of info took forty-five minutes (I worked on this review while it was burning, however).

I also tried Toast Ti's "MP3" disc format, hoping it would work with my MP3 CD player. It worked great except I forgot and included folders, which my player doesn't support. (It only plays the first song in each folder.)

Excellent Extras
The Toast package also includes Spin Doctor, a program for digitizing LP records, cassette tapes, and other audio sources. I didn't test it, but Spin Doctor looks impressive, with filters for reducing noise and pops in analog recordings. Roxio even includes the RCA-to-1/8" mini-jack you need to connect your stereo system to your Mac's sound input. Also included is the full version of iView Multimedia, an excellent photo cataloging program, and QDesign MVP, an MP3 music player.

Unlike it was supposed to be, Toast 5 Titanium is currently not Mac OS X compatible, but Roxio promises a free upgrade when the OS X version is released.

All-in-all, Toast 5 Titanium is excellent. For some, the version of Toast that came with your drive is all you need. But if you do anything more than basic CD burning, you'll want the upgrade. The printed manual alone is worth a good part of the price, and you'll probably find the ability to work while burning will pay you back the purchase price in no time. And if you shop around, you can find good deals on Toast Titanium, making the purchase decision a no-brainer. Five stars!

Available at the Applelinks Store

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