Review: Toast 10
- Article 64 of 89
- MacFormat, March 2009
Roxio's Toast now does too much for its own good and not as much as it used to
There comes a point in almost every mature software program's life when its developers look at themselves and ask, "What are we going to put it in this now?" Roxio's disc-burning program Toast Titanium passed that point some time ago...
The base Toast software is the CD, DVD and - with the aid of a paid-for plug-in - Blu-Ray burning program. Give it some video or audio and Toast will burn it to a disc for you, in one of a multitude of formats, from simple data backup through MP3 CD through to Video CD or DVD. Like iDVD, it also comes with a range of menu themes, so end viewers don't end simply staring at file listings or a blank screen, and Toast 10 has 20 new menu styles for widescreen and 4:3 discs - although these replace those available in Toast 9.
As well as this range of destination formats, there's a wide range of possible sources you can use: there's an iPhoto and iTunes browser, and tools for compressing large videos down so they'll fit onto smaller disks, merging disc images and more. New to Toast 10 are functions for creating AVCHD archives from your high def camcorder, so you can archive your video for use in a project later; and a tool for creating compilation DVDs from several VIDEO_TS folders.
Toast 9 users might pause and wonder if we've left anything out here. But no, it's not us, it's Roxio: the company has removed HD-DVD and DivX disc authoring capabilities. Oh dear.
If that were the extent of Toast's abilities, that would be worth a good £20 or £30. But to justify the £80-£120 price tag, Roxio's thrown in just about every other function it can think of. There's a conversion tool that lets you take video and convert it to play on iPods, Playstations, PSPs, Blackberries, Treos, and other devices. You can extract clips from DVD-Video for conversion. There's a new tool for converting Audiobook CDs into iPod audiobook format while changing the playback speed. There's even a slightly limited tool that lets you capture streaming Flash video from web sites such as YouTube, although as with other similar tools, you'll find the BBC's iPlayer impervious to Toast's powers.
Bundled with Toast is a plethora of other programs, some of which are obviously relevant, some of which take gilding the lily to a new level: there's DiscCatalog Maker RE for cataloguing disks and creating CoverFlow images for them; CD Spin Doctor for recording and manipulating audio files from LPs, tapes or web streams, cleaning them up and adding metadata; the somewhat useless in the UK Mac2TiVo for sending videos to your TiVo; Get Backup 2 for file system folder synchronisation; Disc Cover 2 for making inlays; and the new Streamer application, which together with a free iPhone/iPod touch application lets you watch videos you have on your Mac over the Internet. Since you have to convert the video anyway, why you wouldn't just store it on your iPod, we don't know - unless you have a vast library of videos you'd like to be able to watch on the go.
If you spend the £40 extra necessary for the Professional version of Toast, you'll also get SonicFire Pro for authoring soundtracks; SoundSoap for improving the sound on video and audio files; FotoMagico for creating HD slideshows; and LightZone for touching up photos. These are all available elsewhere, and if you only want one, buy it direct. But you will make a saving if you were planning on buying two or more of these anyway.
There are certainly a few new features that are useful in Toast 10: the slightly improved interface is easier to read and the media browser is easier to use, although the interface as a whole is harder to use, with more and more functionality hidden away in a single palette rather than in menus or a toolbar.
But the other features, particularly those in Toast 10 Pro, are largely superfluous or better obtained in other programs, and don't warrant the price tag. The fact that some features have actually been removed makes Toast 10 less than a must-have for those upgrading. If you want to do some professional authoring and iLife doesn't quite cut it, Toast is the tool to have. But if you already have it, don't bother upgrading.