Toast Titanium

whitesaint

cocoa love
<html><body bgcolor="silver"><p>Toast Titanium - has anyone checked this out yet? It just came out around the expo, and it has the most beautiful interface and burns both CD's and DVD's without waiting for 10.1. It is really easy to use. But anyways now to my question. It supports almost every FireWire drive out there, but does anyone know and if it will include all the USB CD-RW's that were in the previous Toast for Classic? This is important for me, because i just got a CD-RW today, and i dunno if i should keep it until the next Toast comes out or if i should return it. All responses are appreciated, thanks.</p></body></html>
 
While I can't attest either way to whether or not Toast for X.1 supports USB devices, I'd reccomend you getting a firewire burner regardless (unless you don't have a firewire port). High bandwidth USB devices are just silly, and it really isn't what USB was intended to be used for. USB only has 12Mbit to play with at once, where as firewire has 400Mbit to deal with, and you don't, generally, have your input devices plugged into firewire. Even if you did, a CD Burner won't max out the 400Mbit bus (at least not for awhile hehe).

Back to your question, I know that USB support under osx is a little flaky anyways, as classic usb drivers are allowed to function through the hardware abstraction layer (ie, my Keyspan Digital Media Remote worked under X when I had classic running), so I'd say it's quite possible that a USB CDRW might work under toast titanium running under classic -right now-, but I don't have anyway to test, because like I said: high-bandwidth USB devices are dumb :)

-stephen
 
There are reports of people who successfully used Toast Titanium for X with their USB-writer. My USB-writer (LaCie) is recognized by Toast, but crashes when I try to change the name of a new CD to something other than "Untitled CD". Guess that's why it's a preview release... I'm sure USB devices will be supported when the final version comes out... (and that won't be too long from now).
 
The CD burner i have is a 4x4x8 and it connects through USB. I cannot find any CD-RW's anywhere that are available for macintosh that are firewire! This CD burner cost $160.00 plus tax. I kind of feel that im getting ripped off and that I could probbaly get a much better deal elsewhere, like Ebay. If apple is not going to support low-end CD burners maybe i should return this thing then before its too late?

-whitesaint
 
I have a sony firewire CD-RW and i wouldn't recommend it, although all of the hard weare is so-so, the software is horrible. I had to play with it for 2 weekks just to get it to work. Id say 65% of the time i try and turn it on, it doesn't recognize the burner. I've heard good things about LaCie burners.
 
What software do you use with your burner? If your experience with it is _that_ bad, it probably isn't Toast 5. Toast 5 is excellent: looks great, works great (never had any significant problems with it). So if you aren't using Toast: switch over as soon as possible.
 
I use toast 5, and i love it, when the burner works. The software that orignally shipped with it was a piece of shit called discribe. It only worked on the B&W G3 unless you updated it, but it said nowhere that it need to be updated... it took me a while to handle that one. It was enough to sour me over the whole sony/burner idea.
 
Whitesaint: where on earth are you looking? Just go to outpost.com and shop around in the Macintosh section for hardware that you like. Then, if you're feeling particularly thrifty (and confident), go to pricewatch.com and see if you can find a smaller site somewhere selling the same product for less. Outpost is usually pretty decent in regard to prices, and they have excellent customer service. Just make sure they have what you order in stock. It seems like everyone and their brother is making firewire burners: technically all they are is a firewire-ATA bridge and an ATA CDRW mechanism. If you have trouble at outpost.com, check out firewiredepot.com or whatever it is (search the web for firewire depot, it'll pop up).

I have a QueFire! external firewire burner, 12x10x32x. I've had almost no problem with it since a few updates from Roxio (for Toast Titanium, EXCELLENT PROGRAM) and Apple. Apple made a lot of third party burning programs shit the bed when they up and released their take on CD-Burning, which, while decent, just isn't as streamlined as Toast.

Discribe, oh how I loath thee. It's the most worthless program I've ever used, and it's UI would make ol' Tog or Norman throw a temper-tantrum that would be unparallelled. Here's what I'd reccomend for software: Toast Titanium, Disc Burner, Toast 4, a whole PC just for burning CD's, and THEN use Discribe, but only if you have to :)
 
I've got the 4x4x8 version. It's both USB and firewire. I use the firewire so I don't need to plug it into the mains.

It works well under toast titanium for OS X. The only bug I've found is that it won't erase cd-rw disks.:mad:

 

Does anybody out there know if Toast (under OS 9 or OS X) support the HP CD-Writer 8200-series (USB) ? The Toast-pages doesn't really give a good answer, nor does my local Mac-pusher..

Too bad HP doesn't see Mac as a platform for more than it's printers..

- Kristian
 
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