Roxio Toast

The new Roxio Toast is a robust product for disc-storage, managing and duplicating your hard disk. It is extremely helpful as it is capable of disc-spinning, capturing analog audio, printing directly to the disc and encoding video that fits the disc. Roxio Toast offers more convenient and capable mode of copying disc or data that are so easy to handle in Mac OS X. Its audio and video features compliment iLife in Mac. If you use multimedia regularly as a producer or consumer or an ardent back-up creator of your hard disk, then Roxio Toast justifies its price tag of $99.95 for one or more functions.

Multi Tasking Software

You will be amazed to see the range of functions Roxio Toast can perform. It can perform multiple data functions and its disc burning capabilities are very useful. It takes back up of multiple discs and restores the data on a MAC PC. This feature is not available for Windows OS. The best feature about Roxio Toast is that it restores the file accurately bit-by-bit. A back up taken for 1.2GB video file on two separate CDs was restored on a different computer. The file played perfectly on the system exhibiting supreme performance of Roxio Toast.

It is also capable of installing system preferences and let you perform backup that can be manual or scheduled. This can be done for any selected folders or create bootable clone of the system disk. You can also duplicate the folder content. Roxio Toast backs up any hard drive on your system to any remote server or DVD.

It has two options for copying DVD which work only with discs or disc images not protected by copyrights. You can simply run disc to disc copy function that would preserve the menu and other contents. You can choose to copy only the main movie to save disk space.

It can also consolidate data from several DVDS into one DVD by compressing the content automatically so that it fits the target DVD. Roxio Toast imports each movie on all source DVDs independently and depicts each DVD as an individual button with sequential menu. Roxio Toast gives you an option to preview the movie separately and lets you opt if you want it to be included in the compilation. You can also choose from the menu templates. There are 10 menu templates which are presentable but are not editable. One major drawback with Roxio Toast is that it does not have a DVD preview capability. Thus it prevents you from checking the menu operation, checking titles or buttons before burning the DVD. If your menu titles or buttons are not short, then Roxio Toast will automatically truncate them.

Roxio Toast can also be used to overcome the problem of transferring a 90 minute iDVD on a single layer DVD. All you need to do is to build your project normally as in case of iMovie or iDVD. Project Info window should carry the information as a double layer disc but the check the option for "Fit to DVD Video Compression". Roxio Toast shall encode the complete video to fit into a single DVD. If you have any dual layer image compressed on any DVD, you can do the same thing to transfer it to single layer DVD. Sister product of Roxio Toast, Roxio Popcorn, priced at $49.95 easily lets you do this function.

Roxio Toast gives you flexibility to create good quality two hours single -layer DVD from image created by iDVD. You can also burn it on a dual-layer DVD without losing its original quality.

For All the Music Lovers

Roxio Toast would be loved by Mac users especially who use iTunes as their music library, media player and burning their CDs. If you are looking for long term entertainment or create music CDs for a party, Roxio Toast is there to help you out. You can easily create more than fifty hours of songs at 192 kbps Dolby Digital encoding. These can be easily played on DVD players and iTunes fails to give this kind of performance. Except for the DRM music that you have bought off iTunes, you can easily drag songs from your music library, import your playlist and add a random button to play the songs randomly. Check out compatibility with your consumer player, although the disc plays exceptionally well on all PCs.

You can convert the analog music to digital with CD Spin Doctor and burn it with the help of Roxio Toast on to a CD. Breaks between the songs create different tracks that can be renamed. Roxio Toast also supports major video formats including DivX. DivX is a popular format for movies and trailers on the internet and Roxio Toast has multiple disc related capabilities to offer to music lovers. You can not only play the DivX files but can also convert video files to DivX format. Thereafter, you can easily convert these files into standard definition DVD files with a single step. Roxio Toast has the capability to maintain the aspect ratios correctly and produced high-quality video files. It can also produce high-definition DivX DVDs that can be played on any computer with a DVD-ROM. Lastly; it easily includes Motion Pictures HD and burn them into HD DivX movies, VCDs or Super VCDs.