Roxio Toast 10 Titanium (MAC)

Toast 10 is primarily a disk burning utility, and a very competent one at that. Although OS X includes a built in disk burning utility, it's basic to say the least. Toast has all the burning functions you would ever need - Data, Audio/MP3 CDs, enhanced Audio (i.e. Audio and Video on the one disk), Video DVDs, Blu-ray disks (you get a free plug-in to allow you to author blu-ray and you can even burn HD content to a standard DVD and play it back on your blu-ray player; a great way to get the quality of HD, although you can only fit approx. 20 mins of content on a DVD). Toast also taps in to Apple's iLife media browser, allowing you to easily take your media from iLife and export it using Toast.
As well as all of these fairly standard features, Toast is also an excellent file converter for video and audio. Take a Windows Media video for instance, and it can easily convert it for playback on your Apple TV, iPhone/iPod, Blackberry or games console. You can even convert a whole batch of files at one time. One really interesting feature is that you can import a multi-cd audio book, and Toast will automatically convert it to a singe audio file with chapter markers for you to send to iTunes.
The interface is really straightforward - just drag and drop. I've been a user of toast for 5 years now, and this is a great evolution of the product. It seems very fast and stable (I had problems with the previous version frequently crashing); it converted a batch of 35 video files without a problem.
To summarise, this is an excellent utility for the Mac - a great compliment to iLife, and in my opinion an essential program.

I suspect that very few Mac owners are unfamiliar with Roxio's Toast applications in one form or another. For me, this was an upgrade from Toast 7 - so a real change.

1. Installation
Installation seemed a little bit convoluted, - copying a folder to the apps folder and then running an installer... It seemed one step too many but it was up and ready in 10 minutes. It doesn't detect previous versions either and runs alongside. (this can cause problems with the embedded tools if you don't uninstall your old version first)

2. Interface
The interface is familiar and pleasingly simple. Lots of "drag and drop" - simple selections for disc types accommodating mac, pc, DVD, ISO 9660 and photo disc; which I have found a boon in not wasting optical media. There is a nice use of plain english for the options windows (which open discretely and unobtrusively) asking for example, if you wish to span content over multiple discs, add CD text to an audio CD and so on.
This version comes with a free add-on for blu-ray discs. As I don't have a blu-ray burner, I cannot say much about this, other than it seems good value to have included it.

3. Feature Set

A very broad feature set, contained in the spec for this product page, but leaping out as innovative and new are:

The integration for iDevices, the AppleTV and Elgato's EyeTV

There is also a very useful streaming media capture option for ripping live streams

Assistance in digitising Vinyl and magnetic cassette tape, and editing out hiss and pop (it integrates into iTunes by creating Apple lossless track data.

The ability to rip CD based audiobooks and export them to iPhones and iPods with all the audiobook features intact.

There are a number of features tailored for the users of HD Video camera users - but again, I have not tested this functionality

Conclusion:

A very useful, feature rich suite of software offering way more than just disc burning. Roxio may have shot themselves in the foot by sticking to the toast brand-name, as I'd never have thought of it for the more useful (in 2009) features of ripping, capturing and converting media to the plethora of digital devices available. In fact, I can't remember when I last needed to create an optical disc, but I do convert media all the time for my iPhone and from EyeTV and this works admirably on all counts.

The Mac already provides pretty good tools for creating and burning CDs and DVDs, so what's the reason for buying a separate product? Well the tools already present on many Macs tend to be focused on a single task, whereas Toast is the `Jack of all trades' approach.

As with most Mac applications, installation is straightforward and once that's done you find a Toast folder inside your Applications folder that contains the various Toast utilities. Launching the main application (Toast Titanium) lets you quickly choose the type of task, be it creating a data, audio or video disk, or copying and converting existing work. For the data and audio disk tasks, everything you'd expect is there and you're given a fairly intuitive interface (including drag & drop for content management) that gives you control over pretty much every aspect of what you need to do. In that respect Toast lets you tinker more than the default Apple apps. Video disk creation is also fairly intuitive, although you need to have a pretty good idea of what you're doing before you embark on creating the disk. This is because certain types of video files lend themselves better to processing in certain ways.

Copying (unprotected) disks and creating disks from (ISO) image files or even creating image files is as easy as you'd expect, leaving `Convert' as the last of the features of the main program. This is where you're most likely to encounter problems, although this isn't the fault of the software per se, it's more just down to the complexity of converting media from one type to another - some things work well, others don't. Toast boasts that you can convert video to play on the iPhone, iPods, Apple TV, PS3 and XBox 360, and if the media you've got sitting on your Mac lends itself to this sort of conversion, then Toast gives you an easy to use method of doing just that. For instance, I had an avi file of a TV show I wanted to put on my iPhone and it was as easy as opening Finder, dragging the file in to Toast, choosing Video under the Convert option, `iPhone' as the device, `Standard' for the quality setting and then specifying where to save the output (note that you can save the converted output directly into iTunes). The results were fine, although that won't always be the case depending on your source video.

In addition to all the above, Toast Titanium comes with a selection of other tools for watching and streaming content, a disk `doctor' and even tools for printing disk labels. The `Pro' version adds a few more specialist tools for dealing with soundtracks, processing audio, etc., but for the casual user the Standard edition is probably sufficient.

Broadly speaking, Toast is a worthwhile purchase because it makes everything easier where the basics are concerned. Where it may come unstuck is in helping you with the more complex video management tasks because while it gives you most of the tools to do the job, it can't give you the knowledge and that's where a little preparation will go a long way. Inevitably there's certain things it just can't do and there are other tools out there to fill the gaps (like Handbrake and MacTheRipper), but as part of your disk and video arsenal on the Mac, I'd say it's a very useful addition.