Toast 11 Titanium Edition For Mac

The Next Generation Disc Authoring Suite

In spite of a few minor criticisms, version 11 continues to make Toast the industry standard for burning CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs; managing your multimedia for storage or online hosting; and in some aspects, managing your files. Longtime Toast fans will notice a new startup assistant for selecting the type of project. A very simple, clean layout for this inviting user interface is a refreshing change, but power users may wish to turn this feature off by unchecking the box at the bottom-left corner of the window. New users will find video and PDF tutorials under the Help menu.

There’s a noticeable improvement in performance on the software side (given that burn speeds are limited to the capability of your drive), and Roxio has added social media sharing of your video files via Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo with conversion, editing, and audio effects before uploading. Toast also exports video formatted for iOS devices, such as an iPad, but the software could be more space-limitation aware of all of its export types and online hosts in the same way it is for physical media. To add still more value, Toast 11 can capture audio from your system or online.

The only bumps in the road occurred with burning an MP3 CD in that an iTunes library stored on an external drive would not show up in the Media Browser. Also, as simple as it is to move from iTunes to Toast, when dragging-and-dropping the titles to the disc creation window, the software doesn’t recognize when those audio files aren’t in the MP3 format. It will burn the CD regardless of this issue, but the disc will only play the MP3 file types on your player. In spite of these minor issues, Toast Titanium 11 is a great product that continues to set the standard—bar none.

Company: Roxio
Price: $99.99
Web: www.roxio.com
Rating: 3.5
Hot: Fast; easy; great features and value
Not: Doesn’t recognize all file types to match disc media; doesn’t recognize iTunes library on external drive