Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro (MAC)

Mac OS X Leopard has onboard 80% of all the features that you need for most CD recording and archiving purposes. But what about the other 20%? Since version 1, Toast has provided Mac Users with the CD, DVD and now Blu-Ray recording features that aren't in the operating system, and which someone, somewhere is going to need. In addition to this, Toast Pro is bundled with a set of applications for cleaning up audio, displaying photo presentations, relighting images, and an application for scoring videos, with innovative features for purchasing suitable tracks online.

Toast isn't so much an application you're going to make part of your daily life, as the ultimate toolbox for doing things with CD, DVD and Blu-Ray, provided that you have the hardware to support it. Most Macs will happily burn DVD on the internal drive, but for Blu-Ray you need an external Blu-Ray drive -- which is going to set you back a lot more than the cost of the Toast application. Provided that you understand that that's the deal, Toast provides every conceivable tool for dealing with different formats, getting different kinds of data onto disks, backing up (including spanning), and creating hybrid disks. It also enables you to pull things off DVDs and certain DV cameras, and generally muck about in ways that you never could before.

The Pro apps are a little more esoteric. Probably the main reason for going with this Pro version rather than Toast 10 Titanium is the fact that the Blu-Ray plugin is included. But the other applications may interest you. LightZone is an innovative Tone-mapping application, based on Ansel Adams' Zone System, and will appeal to very, very serious photographers. SonicFire is a combination of scoring app and music-finder, although the price of the tracks, if you want them, from $19 to $99, may put you off. SoundSoap is a well-respected noise reduction utility, useful if you recorded your HD video in a gale, or are trying to copy your LP collection onto CD, but without the needle-noise. Fotomagico is a very, very nice application for panning and zooming photos as a way of displaying them (although iPhoto does this to some extent).

So, how good is it, is it worth the money, and what won't it do? Well, basically, it's very good within its limitations. Roxio have done their best to make it as flexible as humanly possible, and yet as user friendly as possible. So it's great on the technical 'making your drive do everything it's capable of but isn't in the OS' stuff, but its collection of CD and DVD cover art and DVD menus is decidedly limiting. Away from its core functionality, the extras are all a bit plasticky -- great if you need to quickly burn and label something, but not if you want to create something to be taken seriously. The same goes for the Pro applications -- they are interesting tools, but not really 'Pro' in the sense defined by Apple Final Cut Studio 2 or Logic Studio. Really, they fit between the bundled iLife applications and the very serious Apple Pro applications -- except for handling difficult burning projects. At these, Toast excels, and is really the only show in town.

Verdict: if you need to do something to do with burning CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray which your Mac doesn't appear to do, Toast Pro is the answer to all your problems. Regular Toast will be fine if you don't need to burn Blu-Ray. All the other features are interesting and nice to have, but probably not worth buying it for. Ultimately, Toast does best what it has always done, and there is nothing better.

I bought Toast 10 pro to give me the ability to burn blu ray discs on an Apple Mac. The pro comes with the HD Pluggin and works perfectly for straight forward Blu Ray burning. Menus are basic, but to get a BD disc it does the job.
Amazon as quick as usual on delivery.

I'm writing this after a three week long attempt to get meaningful customer service out of Roxio. I was new to this product. Having successfully installed it - or so I thought- I opted for the immediate update. The update cancelled out the "pro" features and made the DVD program useless for recordings of more than 57 minutes duration. Deleting the update and reinstalling from the CD restored the original functionality. I raised this with Roxio, which responded with a series of emails wishing me a nice day, but showing no sign that the operatives who contacted me had actually read mine. I rephrased my queries in a list aimed at a mental age of seven +. The response was appropriate only for the first query - no sign that the others had been read. I asked for escalation. I got instead an instruction to do something I had already done and reported on, which did not solve the problem. No indication that any escalation took place. The only positive achievement was to persuade them to stop wishing me a nice day. I suppose that's progress.

No doubt the problems are simple, but Roxio isn't even interested in diagnosing them. I would advise any intending purchaser to look elsewhere.