UGN Reviews UGN Reviews
Toast Titanium 6
By: Roxio
MSRP: 99.00
Street price: 79.00
Reviewed: 06 December 2003
by Daniel M. East President, The Mid-Atlantic Macintosh User Groups Team (See Credits)
Roxio has stepped up with an easy to use product that is great for those who need a little more than the native burn capabilities of the OS. Great if you have an external SuperDrive and can't spring for DVDSP2 since Toast 6 has a nice option for creating DVDs in a basic way that really does work.
Great GUI, simple to use but default settings needed adjustment after wasting a disk or two. The extras (CD Spin Doctor and an iPhoto knock-off) are decent quality but I don't recommend them for anything other than convenience. Toast does the job and does it well. Great upgrade, great design, great functionality. 4 out of 5
Insstallation: Drag and drop into Apps and viola! Standard stuff these days...
Again, I like a nice interface and Roxio has taken Toast to the next level in this upgrade. Familiar and still a nice improvement. Always a good thing. The info is all there and you really don't even need the manual for this application. Very intuitive and easy to use if you are familiar with nearly any CD burn method.
Factory settings should be preset to best possible results. Maybe that is the case, but for my particular setup, I had to adjust a few things which cost me a couple of dead burns. Not a big deal. The DVD output from iLife apps is nice but I would love some options - maybe an iDVD lite to fill that need for those who don't have an internal SD.
The speed doesn't change much, however, I did find larger DVD burn times faster in Toast than in iDVD (although the navigation content is also far less). Overall data times were basically the same. One feature I'd like to see is something that "Dragon Burn" offers; live-to-cd 1:1 burning. Great for live music, broadcasts, etc.. I really like the options (and advanced options) for each format, however, a "auto-detect" would be nice as well.
This is for anyone who needs a few extra features over the native OS burning capabilities or, again, for those with external SuperDrives. This is the one and it does the job well.
Final thoughts: Toast continues to be the industry standard for burning software and this version takes them one step further. Overall rating: 3.5 out of 5 VERY GOOD. For more information, visit: ROXIO.com
Minimum System requirements: PowerMac G3 or later, G4 or later recommended, OSX 10.2x or later, 200Mb free hard disk space (more for video), QuickTime 6 or later, an actual CD and/or DVD recorder, media to record onto.
Daniel M. East ©2003
Test system: Apple Titanium PowerBook G4 500 - 1Gb RAM - 10.3.1
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