by Russ Aaronson
7-29-02

If you've been interested in CD burning software packages like Toast Titanium 5, you've no doubt read reviews in the Big Three Mac magazines, and many of you probably decided to stick with Apple's utterly free and generally capable iTunes, Disk Burner, Disk Copy, and if you have a DVD burner, iDVD. And up until now, I agreed with you. Like all secondary school teachers, my meager tech budget generally prompts me to choose freeware that gets the job done over commercial software that offers a few extra bells and whistles.

Toast changed my mind. I'd like to say it's because of Roxio's perfect combination of flawless authoring software and bundling of stellar helper apps; but Toast, though solid and effective, is not exactly perfect. What's made Toast such an interesting program is what it has revealed to me about the way all of the companies that bring us digital media, or the hardware to play it (Apple included), actively and passively prevent us from doing what we want with all of this expensive technology. As you're about to see, Toast is a must-have application because it evidences a company's steadfast attempt to help users remove limitations and make all this stuff work for us,

What it is – and what you get.

Put simply, Toast (and the software extras packaged along with it) is designed to help you do every conceivable thing you would ever want to do with a CD/DVD recorder. The enclosed CD contains the Toast application itself, along with CD Spin Doctor (used for burning your old vinyl and cassettes) and demo versions of iView Media (a digital asset management tool), Audion 2 (the venerable Mac audio player), and Magic Mouse Discus (CD label software). You'll also see the nearly ubiquitous Getting Started guide, and a complimentary miniplug-to-RCA converter cable, but the most astounding thing you'll find when you open the Toast box is a 237 page User's Guide.

Just in case you fell out of your chair and were rendered unconscious, I'll say that again. This program actually ships with an honest-to-goodness, printed manual. Now, you might not find this to be all that impressive, and some eco-friendly users might even be distressed by this fact, but I'm a big fan of useful books, and this book contains step-by-step instructions for using every aspect of this feature rich application. Seasoned users of digital media software probably won't even crack the book (a testament to the simplicity of Toast's interface), but Toast is designed to be the only burning software you'll ever need, and the manual is a good way to ensure that novice users may effortlessly grow to use more of Toast's massive feature set.

Installation and Updates

Installation of Toast and the aforementioned helper apps is straightforward, though you are likely to find that one of the five apps will need an additional update fresh out of the box (just in the time I've worked on this review, a minor Toast update and a major Audion update have been posted). No worry: the downloads are even manageable for 56Kers like myself, and they seem to install without incident.

Once launched, Toast immediately recognized my poky-but-reliable 4x ZipCD USB burner.

Stop laughing, then continue reading the review.

The Toast Interface – Simpler than iTunes

Roxio's User's Guide states “research has shown that over 94% of CD's burned are one of three types: Data CD's, Audio CD's, or Copies of CD's”, and the new interface reflects this.

Clicking on a button Toast will prompt you to drag the appropriate type of files into the main window. When you're done, click the big red Record button, drop in a blank, and you're off. If you need something from the “other” 6% of burning options, clicking on the “other” button will reveal options for creating VCD's , DVD's (data only here – you'll still need DVD mastering software to create an interface and DVD readable files), Hybrid and bootable CD's, Enhanced CD, and even CD-I discs. The other menu also houses all MP3 disc burning – clearly a move to maintain the simplicity of the “Audio” button. Nevertheless, I wonder if MP3 CD's will score high enough in future research to either gain inclusion into the Audio menu, or even to earn a button of its own. Only time, and the adoption of MP3 alternatives like WMA, AAC, and MP3Pro, will tell.

Remember, Toast is just for burning. If you want to encode or listen to music files, you'll have to do that in a player like Audion or iTunes. In this respect, iTunes beats Toast hands down. This all amounts to two different approaches to the whole media burning issue. Apple wants to make burning available everywhere in the user interface; if you want to burn audio, you use iTunes. If you want anything else, you either 1) use the radioactive stashed in various places throughout the interface, 2) run Disk Burner, or 3) run Disk Copy. Conversely, Toast aims to be your one stop burning shop.

Personally, I was surprised to find the Toast approach to be more effective, and more powerful. On my 400mhz TiBook (192 RAM, 10 gig HD), iTunes can be sluggish when responding to the burn button, yielding a spinning beach ball for up to twenty seconds before moving on to the task. Toast responds immediately. Additionally, having to deal with Disk Copy for Data CD's effectively forces you to use another program to accomplish what amounts to the same task: burning. And if you want to burn VCD's (more on this later), you'll need to find a non-Apple app to do the job. Several hours of noodling around with both leaves me much happier with Toast.

I'll note here that, after burning virtually every type of format Toast has to offer, I wound up with no coasters. Not so with iTunes, which serves up a worthless CD every 5-7 discs on my system, even when burning at 2x speed. I used to assume this was just due to the quality of the media, but Toast leaves me thinking otherwise. It should also be noted that some users of the newest version of Toast for OS X (5.1.4) have suffered from the same burn failure problem that I occasionally see in iTunes. The bottom line: check Apple's and Roxio's discussion boards for your particular setup, and if you see others with the same equipment experiencing problems, switch programs. As always, your mileage may vary.

Based solely on the performance of Toast (and not the bundled helper apps), there's already enough value here to justify a purchase. Then again, this is a pricey piece of software in a fight with Apple's freeware competition. Let's see if the extras sweeten the deal.

Audion – The little music player that should.

When iTunes was first released, most web site discussions bulged with testimonials from users of Audion, Qdesign MVP, and SoundJam explaining why it's sometimes better to pay for an extra widget than to get the whole widget free. Then SoundJam disappeared (its roots became the iTunes we know today) and Qdesign died in that casket where Uncle Steve left OS 9. That leaves Audion 2 as the last holdout from the early Big Three. It's a good looking beast …

… but you'll quickly discover what's rotten in the state of Roxio. The version of Audion bundled with Toast is the disabled, shareware version. You'll have to pony up another thirty bucks to get full-featured MP3 (and with Audion 3, MP3Rage) encoding, as well as several other useful features. Don't get me wrong – the full version of Audion is more than a match for iTunes, but I doubt I'll turn around and pay even more money for yet another application that essentially duplicates the feature set of free software that came with my Mac.

Pardon the pun, but this burns me a bit. If Toast truly wishes to duke it out with Apple's freeware, they need to either include a full featured, linked media player, or include some type of conduit for easier iTunes compatibility. Otherwise, I'm still using too many programs to accomplish too few activities. This is the only area where Roxio lets market concerns get in the way of creating the best CD burning software for the Mac.

On a side note of sorts, the folks who make my Rio 600 player need to wake up. The Rio's firmware can only be upgraded through SoundJam MP – a discontinued program. Since future firmware upgrades could allow the use of AAC files, MP3Rage files, or both, it would be advisable to link up with either iTunes and/or Audion. This would give the player the kind of unlimited expansion that Rio brags about.

CD Spin Doctor – Lite Jam, but still tasty.

Also authored by Roxio, CD Spin Doctor is basically a bare bones editor for externally captured sound. Why keep making those boring old mix CD's from your existing CD and MP3 collection when you can really mix it up with cuts from your old vinyl and cassettes, or with streaming media from your stereo receiver or the internet?

As with Audion, this app doesn't do anything more than many other shareware and freeware programs for the Mac, but it's interface has that same Roxio simplicity, and it works well with Toast once you've captured your files. Also, it recognized my Griffin iMic upon launch, though this could be more attributable to Apple's system than Roxio's software.

I tested Spin Doctor with my old vinyl copy of Steven Wright's landmark, live comedy album, I Have a Pony. This posed a challenge for the program's track definition and audio filter features, but the results were quite encouraging. Even on a live album, the waveform diagrams make it easy to identify edits in the live track, and the filters admirably reduced noise and pops without a terrible degradation in sound quality. Once edited, you just choose the export button, and Toast pops open to take care of the rest.

Obviously, Spin Doctor is no professional app, and even its shareware competitors contain features that easily best Roxio's offering (most notably the ability to make waveform diagrams larger for easier editing), but unlike Audion, it's full-featured and free. If you want professional sound capture and editing tools, you may wish to check out Toast with Jam (I'll leave far more accomplished audiophiles to provide that review for you).

Essentially, the Toast/Spin Doctor combination is a potent combination. Until Apple pulls its audio act together (and with audio inputs on the eMac and the recent acquisition of Emagic, the tide could be turning), these two programs contain nearly everything the novice or intermediate sound enthusiast needs to do interesting new things.

Let iView help you manage all that digital voodoo that you do.

Roxio's inclusion of iView Media allows you to manage all of your digital media files in one convenient program. Again, between iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie, you basically have the same functionality built into the Mac OS, but iView puts all types of media into one indexed, searchable database, which is perfect for the burgeoning digital enthusiast.

It bears mentioning that the version of iView packaged with Toast lacks the features of iView Media Pro (advanced slide shows, format conversions, and indexing figure prominently into the pro version), but you have enough here to make the inclusion worthwhile.

Magic Mouse Discus actually makes CD Labeling Easy

There are many ways to make a CD label, and until I tried Discus, I hated all of them. The software bundled with labelers like CD Stomper is barely better than cooking up labels from scratch, and using templates requires the ownership of additional software like Photoshop (which is an expensive and difficult program for someone who just wants to print a few labels) or AppleWorks (which makes you revert back to Sharpie pens in minutes).

Discus is different. The interface is clean and intuitive, adding text with wraparound effects has never been easier, and adding graphics can be done with relative ease.

But what really makes puts Discus over the top is its close integration with iTunes. You can import any play list from iTunes and just drop it right onto your CD label or case insert, in any font or format you choose. Add to this the ability to easily calibrate your printer for accurate printing on almost any commercial label known to humankind, and you have an unbeatable package.

Discus is also a “bundle” edition. Shell out another twenty bucks and you'll get hundreds of extra label designs and templates for mini-cd's and business card shaped cd's (don't put those babies in your slot-loading Mac!). I know I shouldn't get so excited about this crippled bundleware when I spent so much time slamming Audion, but Discus is the killer CD label app. In fact, I think Discus is so good that I intend to purchase the full version at my earliest fiscal convenience, and as you've learned, that's a compliment coming from me. I digress. Even as limited software, this is a wise addition on Roxio's part, and it does add value to Toast as a whole.

Of iMovie, VCD's, and DVD's.

This next part may seem to be a bit off-topic at first, but if you'll bear with me, I think you'll see what this has to do with the quality of Roxio's Toast.

I decided to try making a VCD of a short student film I made with a good friend a few years ago. The plan was simple: first play the VHS tape of the film on the VCR and record the signal with a Canon Digital Camcorder; then run the digital copy into iMovie for cleanup and extra editing; and finally, export the iMovie (saved in QuickTime format) into Toast for VCD burning using the plugins included on the Toast CD. The process would yield a VCD of the movie that could easily be played in my DVD player, or in my Mac. Not exactly beginner stuff, but not rocket science, either.

First, the good news. The camcorder easily recorded a good quality version of the film, and iMovie did its traditionally stellar job of importing the footage and allowing me to edit it.

Now, the bad news. For some reason, the iMovie plug-in didn't install itself properly when I installed Toast, so I had to do it manually. The User Manual covered this in clear, dummy proof instructions, and it eventually worked fine (Please note: according to posts on Roxio's web site, the plug-in can wreak havoc on iMovie's help system, If you're planning on using the plug-in and iMovie's help in the same session, disable the plug-in and manually save the iMovie file as a QuickTime film, then bring the file into Toast separately. The recently released QuickTime 6 may have ended this problem, but it's still too early to tell).

With the plug-in working fine, Toast easily burned a VCD of the film to CDR – or so I thought. My DVD player couldn't recognize the DVD, and neither would QuickTime 5 or QuickTime 6 Beta in OS X. After doing some reading online, I noticed that VCD's often work better when burned to CD-RW, especially in set-top DVD players. After one more try, this time with CDRW media, the DVD player recognized the VCD, but froze while playing it. QuickTime player rendered a blank movie, even though the time bar clearly showed that the VCD was being played.

Back to the web for more research. After a few hours of reading Roxio's support boards, Apple's support boards, VCDHelp's DVD player compatibility ratings (a must-read for any DVD player owner, by the way), and the web site specifically for my Samsung 709 DVD player (709online.com), I learned two important things:

1. Though virtually every DVD player claims to play VCD's, this compatibility can only be guaranteed for commercial VCD's (which, of course, aren't very popular here in the United States). When recording VCD's on your own, you will find that different models and brands of DVD players have remarkably different thresholds of compatibility depending on file encoding and media type. Research for my Samsung 709 showed that the only brand of recordable CD that reliably worked on my player was made by a company called Primco. I found places to order Primco media online, but 1) they were far more expensive than those I could purchase from more popular brands, and more importantly 2) Primco wouldn't necessarily work on the DVD player of anyone I might send the VCD to.
2. OS X doesn't like VCD's. Some research led me to a shareware app called MacVCD. Once installed and summoned into existence, MacVCD just up and played the VCD, no problems, no questions asked. Apparently, Apple isn't fond of the VCD format, and that's no surprise – VCD's are yesterday's technology (already being supplanted by SVCD, which Toast does not support), and they will forever be associated with bootleg copies of Spiderman and Men in Black II

A few months ago I read an interesting piece in Macworld in which Andy Intahko discussed how wonderful and overlooked the VCD codec is in America. He can now transfer all of his old VHS to VCD, and he has an even more ubiquitous format for sharing files with friends than DVD. Unfortunately, the reality of this format for the rest of us is underwhelming, mostly because of the companies who distribute DVD's and the companies who make the hardware to play them. Apple would have you buy into DVD (a format which is copy protected in flagrant violation of fair use doctrine) and hide the insecure VCD format from your eyes in much the same manner that Microsoft is pushing WMA audio format in lieu of dirty MP3's.

Amidst all of the politics and confusion, Toast just lets you make a VCD. The format's there for you to play with, provided you have the intestinal fortitude to work around every other company's ridiculous political posturing about free and secure formats. In a time when our rights to intellectual property are being determined by a few powerful, wealthy businesses (and again, Apple bears some guilt here), Toast lets you do what you want. For this reason alone, the program is well worth the price of admission. I'll take Toast over the closed systems of Disk Burner, Disk Copy, and QuickTime any day, even if I have to use a separate program and pay a premium. A program like this is just that valuable to us.

(Update: The Toast 5.1.4 update came with a change in the EULA (End User License Agreement) that has already spawned controversy about Roxio's commitment to open standards. The statement in question reads:

"Content providers are using the digital rights management technology contained in this Software to protect the integrity of their content so that their intellectual property, including copyright, in such content is not misappropriated. Owners of such Secure Content may, from time to time, request Roxio or its suppliers to provide security related updates to the digital rights management components of the Software that may affect your ability to copy, display and/or play Secure Content through the Software or other applications that utilize the Software."

According to information received by MacFixIt.com, this clause only applies to the Windows version of Roxio's burning software (Easy CD Creator) and has been added due to that program's support for the WMA audio standard (a secure content standard that requires DRM, or digital rights management software). Of course, this doesn't mean that Toast will not include DRM software in the future, but if it does, the user can still choose to encode files in other formats, or to avoid purchasing content in secure data forms that require DRM coding. Again, it seems that Roxio is leaving the choice with the user.)

Conclusions

With Toast, you generally get what you pay for. It burns with ease and reliability, and it can handle a wide array of media formats. The bundled software generally improves the package (especially CD Spin Doctor and Discus), though the lack of a full-featured audio player (or better iTunes compatibility) needs to be addressed in future versions. You also have to pay for Toast, and Apple gives you most of the same functionality for free.

All told, Toast would normally garner four stars on these merits alone. Factor in Roxio's clear concern for preserving its customers' freedom of choice, and a printed user's manual, and you can find a reason for adding a fifth star. This doesn't mean Toast is flawless, but it does suggest that free is a complicated word. If you have the means, get out your wallet and tell the companies involved with digital media that there are times when choice is more important than cost.

Product	Toast 5 Titanium
Company	Roxio
MSRP	$99.99 (Currently $10 off when ordered direct from Roxio
Hits	User-friendly, multiple encoding formats, printed manual, some nice bundled apps
Misses	Limited audio player, sporadic web support
Rating	(5 possible)
Requirements	OS9.1 or OS X (min 10.1.2), 16mb RAM (rec. 24MB), 110 MB free HD space, QT4 or later, CD or DVD burner and recordable CD's/DVD's

Russ Aaronson

English Teacher,Pompano Beach, FL