Toast 6 Review

bobw

bobw

The Late: SuperMacMod
From another forum;

Just got Toast 6. This software is wicked cool.


Author:_Chupa Chupa__(Registered User)
Date:___08-29-03 12:42

For sometime now the Mac OS and the iApps has marginalized the utility of using Toast 5. So much so that I think many, including myself wondered if Toast would become another also-ran app for the Mac.

Well, I just got my copy of Toast 6, and I'm here to tell you Roxio has reinvented CD burning software with this app. At a time when many software companies choose not to rise to Apple challenge to make great apps and just bow out of the Mac market, its so great to see a program like Toast 6 come along.

The new interface is very clean and more intuititve I think than the old one. But, Toast 6 also packs in some features to justify the $70 upgrade price. I'm not going to go through them all. You can do that at Roxio's web site if you want.

However, I do want to mention the super cool CD-sharing feature. Roxio's site is less than clear about this one, but is one of the best IMHO. You can share a CD or DVD burner via Rendezvous and your wired OR 802.11b/g network. For those of us who have a iBooks or TiBooks with only ROM drives this is an outstanding feature. I just burned a CD from my CD-ROM iBook to my internal CD-R drive in my PM. Backups will be so easy from now on!

The process is only as fast as your network, so if you only have a 802.11b network you'll want to resist trying to burn large files unless you do it overnight. It does take awhile.

The other feature that is a big improvement over Toast 5 is the built-in encoding for VCDs and SVCDs. In the previous versions you had to do the encoding yourself via iMovie or a stand alone program. Toast 6 now does it all for you. One caveat though, most older DVD players (read if its not the current model) will not play SVCDs.

Toast 6 also has a back up feature, but I have yet to test it so really can't comment on how good it is. Maybe soon.

Overall, Toast 6 will well worth the upgrade price IMHO. Kudos to Roxio for not letting Apple be the only company to bring low cost apps to the Mac.

edit: fixed your title ;) - Jason
 
Roxio is such an innovative company, it's good to see they're taking an already great product and making it better. Thanks for the review, Bob, and the link, Wharff. I look forward to upgrading.

"Don't Burn It. Toast It." Hehe.
 
I hope the new 'interface tweaks' don't break the simplicity of Toast 5. Open app, drag stuff on it, click burn. I don't want some 'helper window' or even 'wizard' helping me with a 'project' I'm doing. ;-) I hate those PC CD-burning apps that do that...

What I'd love to see, though, would be "the-ultimately-cool-Toast-Dock-Icon" that would take any input per drag & drop and then open a dialogue for me, formed after the content I've dragged, i.e.:

- If I drag .mpg files onto the icon, it would analyze them and offer me the viable formats (Data Disc, VCD, SVCD, DVD-R etc.).

- If I drag .dmg's to the icon, it would just offer me to burn the image to a fitting disc.

The same, of course, for audio files etc. Only if Toast wouldn't know what the files were (or if there were several types of files) it would simply arrange them to a data disc.
 
Very simple, easy to use interface and burns much faster than ver 5.0 Just tried it.
 
I like the new feature but whoever made the interface, and with that I especially mean the burn button, should be fired. Look at it.
 

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Well it doesn't to me, before I liked working with Toast, but this looks too much like a one-man developer creating a burning app, it also looks way too much like Dragon Burn..
 
Hmm... I like the interface, actually, although the button doesn't HAVE to be that RED... ;-)
 
But it's not as cheerful and simplistic as the previous design.. and blue was a better color..
 
Well, I can see that 'burn' should be something 'red', but a full tone colour is certainly a bit too much...
 
Indeedy-doo. But download a demo of Dragon Burn and see my point. It looks way too much like that..
 
Yea, that Toast interface is terrible. There's a difference between stylish simplicity and down right bad UI. I will have to say it looks better than 5, although i was convinced it was worse just a few days ago.

Toast is still a great app, i hope they made burning arcive DVDs better, because i made a few expensive coaster due to the disc crashing Finder while attempting to access certain data on the disc.
 
From the feature comparison webpage @ roxio: http://www.roxio.com/en/products/toast/product_comparison.jhtml

You can see that quite some new features are in Toast 6. Most important to me: The 'Toast it' Finder contextual menu item. This clearly makes a project backup task much easier than before.

Frankly, I care more for functionality and simplicity than design in a CD burning app. Never found Toast pretty...
 
Toast is a simple-looking program since v5. It's very intuitive and easy to use, and while some of you (not including me) may not like the interface (though I don't think the burn button should be red at all, to be explained later), it gets the job done very well. It's a lot better than other burning applications, and well worth its price.

Here's my problem with the burn button: It's red. In traffic, this means stop. Warning. Caution. Red flag, etc. It may caution someone against burning. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, except that the Abort button is blue, which is far more inviting than red. It seems Toast wants to discourage the user burning a CD yet encourage him to abort it. I like Apple's burn icon much better, though someone might think he's nuking his CD-R...
 
arden: "record" buttons on cassette decks have always been red. It's matter of tradition and a way of saying "Caution: irreversible things happening!" So rec. is red, play is green, ... mmmh ... what colors have we left for "abort"? WEll, yellow would be ambiguous, hence blue for abort. There you are, no problem at all! ;)
 
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