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IF THERE'S ONE thing we learned from Willie Wonka (oh, but there's so much more), it is that it's lonely at the top. Corner a market, and people only expect more from you as competitors try to take your ideas. The market for Mac disc-writing software would have to be described as cornered by Roxio Toast Titanium, but there is no shortage of competitors trying to knock Toast from the top of the food chain so to speak. Luckily, even though Roxio tops itself with every new version, Toast 7 Titanium continues to innovate and add enough features to entice you to either update from an older version or hop on the bandwagon for the first time.
Toast 7 will burn just about any sort of optical disc, but one major addition to the update that potentially affects every disc type is the iLife media browser. From the Toast options drawer, the media browser gives you direct access to your iPhoto library and albums, iTunes library and playlists, the Movies folder and the content of available DVDs (including VIDEO_TS folders). This tearing down of the wall between your iLife content and Toast means there's little reason left not to take advantage of Toast's expansive features rather than burning discs directly from iLife apps.
Data Duty
Key to the Toast 7 update is data disc spanning. If you have a file, folder, archive, drive, etc. that you want to back up, but it's larger than a single CD or DVD can hold, Toast will span the files over as many CDs or DVDs as are required. The stipulations are that the discs you burn must be formatted for Macs only, and the discs you use to span data must be the same type—no mixing CDs with DVDs or 650MB CDs with 700MB CDs.
Disc spanning worked great for us. We started a data disc as normal, choosing Mac Only for the format in the Toast 7 drawer, and dragging files into the window. The capacity of our projects increased, Toast showed the total capacity and number of discs needed in the drawer. When burning, all we had to do was insert new discs as necessary. Once the discs were finished and mounted to the desktop, we saw that Toast 7 included the small Roxio Restore application on each disc for making sure all the spanned files were accessible.
When creating a data disc in Toast 7, the drawer shows new options for creating hybrid data discs with unique content for both Mac and PC users. If you click the More button in the drawer for a data disc, a window opens with new options for dragging in an image to use as the disc's icon and for setting the background color and/or image for the disc's contents.
Let's Hear It for Audio
Toast 7 adds support for the audio formats Ogg and Flac and can also convert audio files to Ogg, Flac, AAC and more. However, the greatest addition to the Audio features of Toast 7 is the Music DVD format. Toast lets you create a DVD with not only many hours of digital music (up to at least 50 hours depending on the compression rate), but also with a menu that can incorporate album art. The iLife media browser makes music DVD creation especially easy. You just create an audio disc with the Music DVD format, open the media browser to Audio, and you can drag entire iTunes playlists into the disc contents. You can also open playlists or the entire library to drag in single songs. If an album or playlist already has artwork assigned to it in iTunes, that artwork will carry over, and Toast displays it in the content window. If you want to add or change the album artwork, select a song or playlist in the list, and click the Edit button. In the resulting window, you can drag in any image and set it as the album artwork.
Music DVDs in Toast 7 are encoded with Dolby Digital sound with full 96KHz/24-bit audio quality, and as a default option, the DVDs will take advantage of a shuffle/random playback mode if there is one built into the DVD player used for playback. You can choose for the disc to have no menu, or pick one of the ten color DVD menu themes Toast 7 provides, as well as write in a menu title that can be different than the disc title. Our music DVDs from Toast 7 played back wonderfully on Macs as well as commercial DVD players. They're great for archiving music or podcasts. Our only complaint is that Toast 7 no longer supports AAC songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store like Toast 6 did, so we couldn't back up our iTunes Purchased Music folder to a DVD.
One of the bonus programs Toast 7 includes, CD Spin Doctor 3, has received function and usability enhancements. It also now comes with the Desktop Recorder Dashboard Widget, which is a quick alternative for recording from your Mac's built-in mic or external audio sources.
Turn Up the Video
The most important additions to Toast 7's Video CD and DVD features are the many conversion options and DivX support. If you don't know about the DivX format, that's probably because it has not been well supported on Macs yet. However, more consumer electronics devices are supporting DivX, and there is a large amount of free DivX content available on the Internet. Toast 7 lets you take iMovie projects or other QuickTime-formatted videos and your Mac and burn DivX discs (high or standard definition) with them. Even better, you can load up Toast 7 with DivX videos you have downloaded and burn standard DVDs that you can watch on a Mac or your living room player.
Video conversion may not be exciting, but in Toast 7, you can convert video files to and from most common video formats, as well as the aforementioned DivX, the Tiger-friendly H.264 format and others. There's even a dedicated setting for the Sony Playstation PSP, which is especially cool if you use an Elgato EyeTV PVR ($Varies, www.elgato.com) to record TV shows on a Mac. EyeTV 1.8 has an export to Toast option, so you can export recordings to Toast and then to a PSP.
Another companion application, Motion Pictures HD, has been updated and exports widescreen, high-definition (or standard definition) photo slideshow movies to iDVD, iMovie HD or directly to Toast. It can also include the original images when exporting to a Toast disc. Motion Pictures HD also includes a media browser for dragging in photos and music from the iPhoto and iTunes libraries, and its many options for grouping pictures into a single frame or for panning and zooming are versatile and fun to play with.
Makin' Copies
For the first time, Roxio has included all of the functionality of its Popcorn DVD copying program in Toast 7, which is an excellent value. The key feature here is the video compression, which lets you copy the content from a non-copy protected double-layer (9GB) DVD and compress it to fit on a single-layer (4.7GB) DVD. Another option is to weed out the DVD extras and only copy the main feature.
With a dizzying array of useful features—the one-click Toast It contextual menu option, scheduled back ups, editing videos' start and end points and much more—Toast 6 was already a champ. The abundance of new tricks and goodies in Toast 7 Titanium solidify the program as a must-own for any Mac user who burns optical discs more frequently and for more purposes than making an occasional mix CD.
–MARKKUS ROVITO
Toast 7 Titanium: 
Roxio | www.roxio.com | 800-518-2432 | $100
Pros: Tons of new features such as an iLife media browser, DivX movie discs, new audio and video formats, updated audio recording and slideshow companion software, Music DVDs and data disc spanning.
Cons: Data disc spanning only works for Mac-only formatted discs, support for iTunes-purchased AAC files not carried over from Toast 6.
Requires: OS 10.3.9 or higher, G4 or better, QuickTime 7 or higher
macHOME recommends: DVD burner, G5 for viewing DivX files, up to 15GB free disk space, Elgato EyeTV PVR hardware/software
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