Product Reviews

In its various guises, Toast has led the Mac CD authoring market for years. But thanks to Apple's new-found interest in CD recording and the resulting free availability of its iTunes and Disc Burner programs, Toast is faced with a real threat to its dominance. If the evidence of this latest update is anything to go by, however, this rivalry will mean nothing but good news for the customer.

Now under the wing of Roxio, a division of Adaptec, Toast has had a welcome interface revamp. Unlike the questionable 'skins' that made a brief appearance in version 4, this overhaul addresses usability as much as fashion.

Design cues lifted from Mac OS X have resulted in a resizable main window that occupies more screen real estate, but is unquestionably more intuitive.

The window is dominated by three large, blue buttons that control the most common burning options - data, audio and CD copying - with a fourth allowing access to more esoteric authoring formats. Clicking on each button reveals further choices - the Data button, for example, displays a list of four possible data types (Mac OS, Mac OS Extended and hybrid CD options for each).

As with previous versions of the program, files and folders are prepared for burning by being dropped on to a central pane; this is now scrollable and shows folder and file contents in the same window, rather than requiring a trip to a second dialog box. Names of files - and even the CD itself - can also be edited here, simplifying the whole preparation process.

Audio CD creation follows a similar pattern: files added to the main window are treated as a playlist. Toast can translate audio contained in any QuickTime-supported file, but it also allows you to burn CDs directly in MP3 format - a feature that will appeal to owners of CD-ROM-based MP3 players. For conventional output, the program can replace each MP3 file in the playlist with a standard CD-compatible AIFF copy simply by clicking the Extract button at the bottom of the window.

Recording is also more intuitive. Toast's large Record button

The outstanding new feature is the ability to burn CDs in the background. In our tests, this worked superbly. Even on a 4x external USB CD writer - the sort that is almost guaranteed to suffer occasional buffer underrun problems - Toast happily burned away with no errors or loss of writing speed. Toast does this by hogging as many of the system resources as it needs to complete a burn, so the speed of foreground applications can be compromised. That said, we didn't notice a significant performance hit on a 400MHz G3.

Feature frenzy

Toast 5.0's feature count is given a massive boost by the addition of DVD-R, DVD-RAM and DVD-R/RW support, neatly incorporating the features of its standalone Toast DVD title. There are a few morsels for video producers, too. Video formats, such as QuickTime movies, can be dropped on the main window, and the MPEG conversion to Video CD takes place on the fly. A plug-in even allows you to burn movies directly to Toast from iMovie 2.0.

There can be few complaints about the bundled applications either, although the versions of Spin Doctor and Audio Extractor are unchanged from Toast 4.

The bundled MP3 encoder is workmanlike, and so is the label creation tool. A hidden gem lies in the included AppleScripts that automatically transfer a CD's content listing to a label template in QuarkXPress, FreeHand or AppleWorks. Toast has also replaced the Photo Relay cataloguing software with a tailored version of iView Multimedia Pro, a more versatile tool ideal for tracking graphics over a number of CDs.

Overall, there are remarkably few weak spots. The iTunes conflicts that affected some users with Toast 4 have been ironed out here: we encountered no problems burning audio CDs from iTunes while Toast 5.0 was running.

The same can't be said for Disc Burner, which didn't recognise blank CDs when Toast's system extensions were active. Other niggles are minor: provision for incremental backup is still undernourished and, despite the Aqua look, the program won't work with the retail version of Mac OS X. Roxio promises an update soon.

Even measured against capable, free applications, such as Disc Burner, Toast offers enough extra flexibility to more than merit its price. Toast has become significantly easier to use and far more powerful at the same time. For this it comes highly recommended.

NEEDS: Mac OS 8.6 or later, 12Mb RAM, 200Mb hard disk space

HELP: Unlimited Web