To Toast or not to Toast
by
Dennis Kovich


Toast9a
Back in April of last year, I gave a presentation on how to burn a CD and gave out a six page handout. You still have the handout, Right?? I talked about four programs that you could use for burning CDs. One of them was Toast 8. Well, the people at Roxio have been busy.

Introducing Toast 9 Titanium – the next generation of disc burning on the Mac. The list of New and Improved Features is awesome! Just about anything you can think of that you would want in a disc burning program to do, Toast 9 does. I have many movies from cable that I burned using Tivo. They are all titled, “My DVD”, Aargh I am so busy watching the size of the movie, I forget to put the title in. Somebody told Roxio about this pea-brained person whose DVDs have all the same name, and did something about it. Now they have a Disc Title Reminder. Before you burn, a reminder window comes up and pokes you in the eye and tells you that you didn’t name your DVD. This little feature isn’t even on the new and improved list, but it’s at the top of my list.

You can catalog and burn all your files across multiple CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs formatted for both Mac and PC and schedule backups with the new Get Backup application. You can use Blu-ray discs as the ultimate archive medium! A dual-layer Blu-ray disc can store as much as 50GB of data and with Toast 9 data spanning you can use multiple Blu-ray discs (or DVDs or CDs) to save, catalog and burn all your data, music, photos and videos.

Toast 9's improved backup utility lets you easily schedule sessions to any hard drive or networked device or burn to Blu-ray, DVD or CD discs. New filters allow you to preselect specific content to save while new compression minimizes the size of the backup.

I must have over 50 archive discs storing all my files, folders, programs and documents that I’ve used over the years. Trying to find a file that I generated two years ago is a nightmare! Toast 9 automatically catalogs and tracks the contents of your discs making it easy for you to locate any file on burned discs even if that disc is not in the drive!

Toast 9 lets you import and create high-def video from TiVo, EyeTV, AVCHD camcorders and burn to Blu-ray and standard DVD discs and watch your movies and TV shows over WiFi on your iPhone or any net connected Mac or PC.

Do you like listening to music? Expand your music library by recording streaming audio directly from the Internet. Use Toast 9's new audio fingerprinting technology to identify songs and tag with titles, artists, album and more. Create great sounding mixes for burning to CD or even create music DVDs.

Toast 9 has now added support for burning up to 30 GB of HD DVD, trim and remove unwanted video segments from TiVo and EyeTV recordings, produce high-def Blu-ray or HD DVD movies on standard DVD media. The unique audio fingerprinting technology automatically identifies and tags unknown tracks. It will even capture streaming Internet audio – or any sound – as you hear it.

There are many more features of Toast 9 Titanium that I didn't cover but if you have Toast 8 and are thinking of upgrading, I highly recommend it. If you're new to Toast, take it for a test ride and you decide. I'm sure you'll make the right decision. I did.