Amazon.com Review: The days of the simple CD-burning utility are seemingly over, and in the case of Roxio's Toast 5 Titanium, it's a good thing. Lately we've been seeing CD-burning software that attempts to do everything but clean the kitchen sink, with varying levels of success. In the case of Toast 5, the proverbial sink is spotless. Plenty of useful features like CD labeling, audio extraction, and data storage provide meat-and-potatoes satiation. The ability to remove hiss and crackle from old LPs, and Toast's new OS X-influenced interface, is like the cherry on top of the dessert. And, of course, the bread-and-butter feature is Toast's delicious burning options.
Roxio has kept the functionality of its drag-and-drop window intact from the previous version, only now the design is reminiscent of a funky '50s diner jukebox. The window is resizable, with simple buttons specifying the type of CD you wish to burn. Click audio, data, copy, or other, and the button turns blue. Pop a blank CD-R into your drive, drag your files into the window, hit that big red glowing record button in the corner, and you're cooking. Toast 5 continues to support all major CD formats (like the previous version), and additional formats including MP3, Mac/ISO hybrid, and VideoCD (playable on many DVD players). If that was all there is to this package, we'd be done right here, satisfied, and ready for a nap.
But, as we've mentioned, Roxio has loaded plenty of goodies onto the Toast 5 CD-ROM, some of them frivolous and fattening, (isn't that what goodies are for?) some of them extremely useful sides. We particularly like iView Multimedia, which lets you catalog all your images, building a thumbnail library for easy organization and retrieval. Also cool is CD Spin Doctor. Although we love our vinyl here at Amazon.com, we've yet to see a device that will play records in the car. CD Spin Doctor is a simple application that will digitize and create a waveform of your old LPs and cassettes, then let you add simple filters to improve the audio. Remove hiss, clicks, and pops, and then burn the result to audio CD.
There's plenty more on the table. Magic Mouse Discus is a basic labeling kit for your CDs. Or you can export included templates to Freehand 9, AppleWorks, or Quark for more complex graphic design for your labels. New in Toast 5 is the useful background burning capability, allowing you to work in other applications while Toast is cooking up your discs. Make sure you have plenty of RAM for this function. You even get folders filled with excellent digital photographs and free music from popular groups and musicians.
We could go on listing savory features, yet will contain ourselves and simply admonish the Macintosh users among you: There's no reason not to buy Toast 5 Titanium. It's a well-balanced, nutritious software program that will slake your ravenous hunger. --John Bosch
May be preferable to Toast 6 Apple's iTunes does fine by burning CD's, but Toast is handier for burning and copying non-musical files and documents. In fact, Toast 5, with the bundled Spin Doctor, is the only way to go if you're converting analog to digital and editing out "dead space" and other objectionable noise on the wave forms. Toast 6, on the other hand, includes an "improved" Spin Doctor (v. 2) that makes the aforesaid editing a laborious, imprecise, and impractical exercise. If you're planning to do manual editing of extended audio tracks--a radio broadcast, for example--forget about Toast 6. But now you have another messy problem: Toast 5 is not designed for OSX, and Roxio no longer offers as a download the necessary upgrade to make Spin Doctor, v. 1, compatible with OSX.
The solution? Go with Toast 5 and use it in OS9. Or switch to a shareware program like Sound Studio (more complicated and time-consuming than Spin Doctor). Or switch to a PC and pick up Cool Edit.
Great for Mac users Great overall for Macs. I got this software mainly due to the fact that iPhoto does not allow for multisession burning. Using this software allows me to achieve this although it not as easy as I originally thought (nothing is as easy as using Mac software - oh well). Also, I had some problems making cross-platform (Mac/PC) discs. Additionally, the included Discus software is pretty good for making labels.
hella good it's the best, all i'm waiting4is2get my cd/dvd recorder! have explored it, very good
Spin Doctor let-down I bought Toast Titanium so I could record LP records and cassette tapes to CD. Spin Doctor has turned out to be an extremely poor application.It will not allow me to turn down the recording volume enough to prevent distortion. The application crashes constantly while I'm setting up beginnings and endpoints of the digitized music. Roxio support told me to delete a file which did not help. With Mac OSX 10.2.3 you can not listen to the music as you digitize it. Roxio support says this is due to Mac going to OSX and that they have no plans to fix it. There is no "help" icon. If information is not addressed in the hard copy instructions you are out of luck. This appears to be a quick and dirty application for OS9 that doesn't function well with OSX 10.2.* or later. Spin Doctor was the entire reason that I bought Toast and frankly iTunes (V3) is easier to use than toast when it comes to organizing and using music.
Loaded With Features, Yet Still Missing Some Roxio Toast Titanium edition is a very complete program that any amateur "ripper" should be happy with. The program's limitless audio burning features and data/video/photo choices make it one of the best programs for customizing CDs and burning Video CDs (VCDs). One of the best features as far as I'm concerned is the MP3 burning ability, which lots of earlier programs did not come with. If you have a MP#-compatible CD player or computer, you can store hundreds of more songs on a MP3 disk than on a regular CD. One of the only features I was disapointed with was the CD labeling software. The software included was only a demo, which was a surprise to me because from the retailer review (which is really just an advertisement) it sounded like I was going to be getting a much better program. I think the PR team at Roxio did a little creative number to get around the fact that it was a demo. The program also did not allow designing of many popular CD inserts...
OVERVIEW
Pros: -Lots of Features -MP3 Abilities -Video/Photo Choices -Combatibility with many CD-Drives
Cons: -Bad CD Labeling Software -iMovie VCD Extension did not Work
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