Product Reviews

Since Apple's incorporation of CD-RW drives into the majority of Macs, CD burning has become a nearly ubiquitous pursuit among Mac users. But as Toast is bundled with the majority of third-party drives, and Apple's own Disc Burner software is somewhat limited, it has long been the de facto standard CD and DVD burning software on the Mac.

However, the transition to Mac OS X has caused problems for Roxio, as its products burrow deep into the system to interface with hardware, drivers and low-level code. Roxio did an impressive job of getting a preview version of Toast for OS X out in time for Macworld Expo New York last summer - just three months after OS X's initial release.

Bear in mind, though, that the company has only just released a finalised version, available as a free download from Roxio's Web site, in the form of the Toast 5.1.1 Titanium updater. It's a 7.3Mb download, so for those without broadband Internet access, Roxio will supply it on CD at no cost.

Toast 5.1.1 is fully Carbonized, so the same application works in both Mac OS 9 and OS X. The updater will work in either operating system, but if you're planning to use Toast in OS 9, then you should update in that operating system to ensure the new versions of the system extensions get installed properly.

The updater creates a brand-new Toast folder in your Applications folder, but you have to transfer most of the files from your original install manually. These include the additional applications that come bundled with Toast, but so far only two of these, CD Spin Doctor, is OS X native. The OS X version of Spin Doctor must be downloaded separately. A note on Roxio's Web site says that updaters for the others - iView Media, the asset management package, Magic Mouse Discus, for CD label creation, and Panic Audion, the MP3 player, that replaces the QDesign

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MVP player - will be out soon.

Features list

Toast itself is now almost fully complete under OS X. It has the full flexibility of its OS 9 counterpart, allowing you to burn CDs and DVDs in just about any format from within a simple, user-friendly environment. It includes some crucial features that were missing from the preview releases, such as full support for creating, mounting and copying disc images and better support for long file names. The background burning feature works flawlessly and is enhanced by Toast's Dock icon, which has a handy progress bar to show you how the burn is going while you're in another application.

Version 5.1.1 also supports a number of additional drive mechanisms, including DVD+RW drives, although using SCSI CD-RW drives under OS X is still rather convoluted: Toast will recognise drives that adhere to the MMC standard, but only after a third-party patch has been installed.

There are a number of notable absences from the OS X version of Toast's feature set that prevent it from being up to par with the OS 9 version. The iMovie plug-in, which enables direct exporting from iMovie to Video CD, is missing, although Roxio says an update will be available soon. In the meantime, you can export iMovies to QuickTime and use the Toast Video CD Support QuickTime codec to encode footage into the required MPEG-1 format.

When you insert a blank disc under OS 9, the dialog box that appears includes an option to open Toast. This is a handy feature, but it's sadly lacking under OS X. And there's a serious limitation concerning bootable CDs: while Toast can make working copies of existing bootable discs, it still can't create an OS X bootable CD from scratch.

Burned offering

For a long time, Toast has been one of those applications that you come to rely on without even thinking about it, and its arrival on OS X is just as important because it's so downright useful.

While Toast 5.1.1 does most of the important things it needs to do, it would be hard to classify it as a full product. Roxio may have had a hard time dealing with the architecture of OS X, but it has had plenty of time to work on making sure its product has the same features on both operating systems. There's no denying the release of Toast 5.1.1 will be warmly welcomed by Roxio's customers itching to switch to OS X, but we can't help thinking this feels a bit like another preview release.