Review – Roxio’s Toast 11 Remains The Swiss Army Knife For Optical Media On The Mac OS

For almost 20 years, Toast has been the leading tool for manipulating optical media on the Mac OS. It remains an interesting and fairly rare example of an application that crosses over between an approachable price and true professional features.

Ownership of Toast has changed often, starting first with Astarte, continuing through Adaptec, and ending up with Roxio in 2002. Now owned by Rovi, Roxio has continued to add significant features: Toast 8 added the ability to capture streaming internet audio, Blu-ray disk authoring capability came in Toast 9, and Toast 10 added audio book conversion.

Two Versions

As they did with Toast 10, Roxio markets two versions of Toast 11. The first, Toast Titanium, includes the basics and more and lists for $100. You get the capability to flexibly capture, copy, convert, and burn. I tested and used Toast 11 Titanium, version 11.0.4, on a 24-inch iMac running Mac OS 10.6.8.

The second version of Toast 11 is Toast Pro, which lists for $150 and adds Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 image editing software, FotoMagico 3 RE slideshow software, Bias Soundsoap 2 SE audio noise reduction software (along with the Soundsoap plug-in for Toast), Sonicfire Pro, and a plug-in that allows HD video authoring to DVDs and Blu-ray players.

Dealing With Physical Media

Toast 11 adds the capability to burn to multiple optical drives at once and copying features are improved. You can also now span audio CD projects across multiple disks, though there isn’t as much flexibility here as I would prefer.

Over the last few releases, Toast has integrated the audio compact disc mastering features that were once part of a separate Roxio application called Jam (yes, Toast with Jam). There’s a flexible cross-fade editor and you can (very) precisely control track length. You can also easily normalize audio so one loud track doesn’t overpower others.

And than there’s storage. While many folks seem to feel that there is no longer a place for optical media in their workflow, write-once media has many advantages including immunity to a hard drive crash, electrical surge, data corruption, or OS and interface changes. For the past two versions Toast has had a Blu-ray option, and with the size limitations of traditional DVD media, being able to write data to a 25 or 50 Gigabyte Blu-ray disc is often useful, as is the ability to master HD video content. Even though the Mac OS doesn’t natively support Blu-ray authoring, Toast 11 can author to either an internal drive (such as those available from MCE) or an external drive (such as those available from LaCie).

Changing Emphasis

Roxio knows that the world is moving away from physical media, so Toast 11 can now do many things that don’t necessarily involve shiny platters (the traditional toaster icon now has an iPhone in one of its slots). It can publish video directly to YouTube (and automatically Tweet those links), Vimeo, and Facebook. Toast 11 also now has integrated Adobe Lightroom library browsing in addition to the previously available Aperture library browsing.

Video conversion is also improved, with many more formats such as iPhone 4/4S and Android getting presets. There’s also an improved DVD video extraction feature. In addition, there’s a VideoBoost feature that substantially accelerates H.264 conversion if you have relatively recent Nvidia graphics solutions (Toast uses Nvidia’s CUDA technology, so you are out of luck with AMD/ATI or Intel graphics). Many of these video capabilities were first available in Roxio’s Popcorn video conversion application.

Usage Observations

Toast’s updated interface removes many quirks from previous releases but keeps most of the basics that users of those versions are familiar with. A new Assistant window can walk new or inexperienced users through common projects.

I mastered and burned my annual holiday audio CDs using Toast 11. The precise control of individual track length was quite valuable and the iTunes integration was flexible and very convenient. Toast 11 also burned very reliably — I had no failures in over 70 burns.

In recognition that few users will read the PDF manual, Roxio now includes a tutorials section. Finally, longtime users of Toast will be extremely pleased to note that the updating process has been substantially streamlined and rationalized.

Conclusion

Roxio’s Toast 11 is highly recommended for those who deal with optical media and want professional results. It is also now increasingly easy to repurpose media already created within Toast, though I do not believe folks without any physical media needs will have Toast in their toolkit.

All in all, Toast 11 Titanium is a solid upgrade for users with previous versions of Toast and a good entry point for users wanting more manipulation of optical media than Apple integrates into Mac OS and iLife, especially the ability to use Blu-ray. Toast 11 Pro should be considered if you expect to use one or more of its bundled applications. It will be interesting to see how many more versions of Toast Roxio releases before optical media ceases to be a market worth chasing. Roxio Toast 11 is a Mac Edition Radio Holiday Pick!

John Mulhern III, posted 12/28/2011

For more information on Roxio Toast visit: www.roxio.com