Roxio Toast 7 Titanium (Mac) Description:

Roxio Toast 7 Titanium (Mac) review:
5 stars (The Ultimate Disk Burning Suite) - Mac OS X has some satisfactory burning tools built into the operating system, so why spend $75 on Toast 7? Well, Toast 7 does everything you wish your Mac could.



First, DVD burning. Toast allows you to import all sorts of video files, and burn them onto a video DVD, for viewing in your set-top DVD player. This is a great feature, if you have some Divx video files, on your hard drive. Drag them into the video folder in toast, and burn a video DVD.



Furthermore, do you have some un-encrypted DVDs, perhaps ones made in your set-top DVD recorder with video camera footage of your family? With toast, you can import titles from those unencrypted DVDs, and put them onto a DVD, with fun and easy to navigate menus.



New to Toast 7 is a great new feature that allows you to compress an unencrypted video DVD image into a size that will fit onto a single-layer disk. This basically gives you the functionality of popcorn built right into Toast 7.



Data Backup - Toast works fantastic as a backup utility. There is even an application included to schedule backups on a regular basis. Toast 7 allows for disk-spanning backups, which allows you to backup many gigabytes of data over multiple DVDs or CDs.



Audio - Toast 7 will obviously allow you to burn music CDs, but you can also burn a DVD. The DVD will load on a set-top DVD player, with menus, to select music, and a shuffle feature. You can get gigabytes of music onto these disks, and then play them in your DVD player.



Pictures - Toast 7 includes an application called Motion Pictures HD, which allows the importing of photos to make great slideshows. They can be in beautiful widescreen, or even high-definition, if you make a Divx DVD (note that Divx DVDs can only be played in special DVD players).



Import Analog Audio - CD Spin Doctor is included with Toast 7, so you can easily import analog audio via your computer's audio input. You might input audio, from a VHS tape, cassette tape, or record.



Discus RE - Discus RE is a simple, but convenient way to create labels, for your DVDs. It includes the templates, for dozens of the most popular DVD labels, so then all you have to do is design your label and print it. Easy.



[...]



Overall, I have only had Toast 7, for a few days now. However, it might be the most useful application I have ever purchased, for my Macintosh. Toast 7 allows you to do just about anything you would want to do, when it comes to burning DVDs and CDs. Furthermore, it is easy to use. I was taking advantage of Toast 7's many features within just minutes of installing the software. Give Toast 7 a try, for it will quickly become one of the most used applications on your Mac.
4 stars (Best Toast Upgrade Yet!) - I've used Toast since the early 90's, and this is by far the best version yet. I've always upgraded before to get nice little interface and usability upgrades, but this upgrade really is revolutionary for Toast. It takes a fantastic CD/DVD burner and adds some great totally new features:



1) Really good backup. Finally, I can backup chunks of data larger than 4.7 GB. The capacity of a standard DVD is about 4.7 GB, and I've always had to pick and choose which data to backup to fit it within that limit. But with the new Toast, they've added the ability to span a single backup across multiple DVDs. So, I can backup 10 GB, 20 GB, whatever. That's a great upgrade.



2) Easy movie DVD backup. They've added an easy, slick way to backup my movie DVDs to 4.7 GB DVD-+R. I've used the other conversion programs and they are very cumbersome. Toast makes it easy to do the conversion, and the quality is great. They worked with DivX to get the newest version of DivX that isn't even released yet for Mac.



CONCLUSION: There are many, many new reasons to upgrade to Toast 7. Overall, it's one of the best upgrades yet. I only wish they offered a better deal to upgraders. Other software let's upgraders pay about 30-40% of the full price, but Toast has recently done away with upgrades, and instead does a small mail-in rebate. Oh, well, they still get my money. :-)