Mulling Over An Upgrade To Toast

[chopper]

I have Toast Six Titanium and am thinking about upgrading to whatever the current version is ... 10? Looking at the Roxio site it appears that there isn't an easy upgrade path and I need to buy Toast 10 outright ... anyone have any experience with it?

Is there a better/cheaper alternative?

Looking to burn some AVI files to DVD for my wife.

Dating myself: I had Toast (1.0) on an 8500 running 7.6 or something. Might have been 8.1.

[michaelb]

I bought the upgrade to toast 9 last year, also coming from 6 I think. I got it for the disk spanning. I am not sure if there are other easy ways to do that. But I do like being able to burn my photo and music libraries to DVD onto multiple disks once or twice a year. I have those in my desk drawer, so an offsite location as a backup to the HD backups at home.

The HD plug ins are also interesting, although I haven't played with them much. But it will allow me to burn an HD disk on a regular DVD to play in HD-DVD player.

I am not sure toast is needed though to burn .avi files to disk. I don't have .avi files, and toast might do that, but that sounds more like a file conversion issue and less a burning issue. QT or imovie might do that for example.

[freeradical]

What does Toast do that the built in disc burning utility that comes with the OS doesn't?

It seems like it's quite expensive for a one trick pony.

[MacArtist]

Multi-session burning.

converting DVD to iPod/Apple TV

[Robert M]

Free,

Toast is on the expensive side but it is by no means a one trick pony. Toast is far less clunky when it comes to copying and/or burning CDs and DVDs. If you've ripped a DVD, you can use Toast to compress it to fit on a single layer disc, just like Popcorn. Toast also includes software for other purposes, i.e. TIVO transfer utilities. This is just tapping the surface of the features. It can do much more. You'd have to use a bunch of different programs from a variety of publishers to match what Toast offers in one package. Definitely worth the money if you haven't upgraded in a long time.

Robert

[spacescape]

I also have Toast Titanium 5 or 6 and Jam for Red Book Ready CD's. I've been debating getting Toast 10 for my MacBook Pro but just haven't felt like coughing up the cash yet.

The built in burning software works good but not that great either.

[Gareth]

Last time I used X's built-in disc burning, everything I wanted to burn got copied to a temporary folder (meaning you had to wait for everything to copy and have that much extra disc space BEFORE burning). I don't know if they've changed that, b/c I just use Toast for everything now, where I can burn files from multiple locations without the hassle. Plus, I use the TiVo transfer program and a few other features.

[Seacrest]

I bought Jam years ago to burn continuous mix CDs with track numbers.
Think it was around $300, is that right?
Kept using the Toast that came with that for a little while.

Good ol' days.

Haven't burned an audio, video, or data disc in years now.

[Silencio]

Is Toast 6 even compatible with Leopard? Roxio did have to come out with a belated patch for Toast 7 to make it work under 10.5.x.

I don't burn tons of data discs anymore, but do a lot of video conversions, and Toast 9 and 10 do a pretty good job of it.

Jam's functionality has been merged into Toast.

For me, Toast is still worth the money.

[Kramerica]

No upgrade path, but there is a $20 rebate available if you are upgrading from a previous version.