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Roxio Toast 20 Titanium Review
| Reviewer: | Stephen Qualtrough |
| Developer: | Roxio |
| Ranked: | 7th |
| Overall rating: | |
| Price: | $99.99 |
| Purchase: |
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Review summary
Good points
Wide range of disc types supported
Substantial amount of extra features
Fast and effective disc burning for Macs
Bad points
Extra features are often tricky to use
More expensive than its competitors
Our verdict
If you’ve got a Mac and you still like the idea of putting data on discs, then Roxio Toast 20 Titanium is your go-to solution. The best disc burning solution for Macs, Toast Titanium has a full feature set and a variety of extras that combine to create a valuable package.
Full review
Roxio’s Toast is traditionally one of the market-leaders in digital media organization and compilation, and this Mac product ticks a lot of boxes. With solid disc burning capabilities and a whole heap of extra software, Roxio Toast 20 Titanium is certainly worth a look.
Setup
You can download the software via the Roxio website or buy an actual disc to set up the program. You’ll need a Mac with at least 1GB RAM free, and the software works with Mac OS X 10.7, 10.9, 10.10, and partially with Mac OS 10.8. Setup of the Toast suite is fast and simple to accomplish.
Disc burning
Roxio Toast Titanium provides you with fast, effective, efficient disc burning capabilities whether you want to transfer data to DVD, VCD, HD DVD, Blu-ray, or CD. You choose a main option - Data, Audio, Video, Copy or Convert - and from those options come a variety of choices, for example to create an audio CD, a music DVD, or an MP3 disc. Once you click on an option it takes you through to the next stage of the process where you can configure the settings and ultimately burn to your selected disc.
Toast supports MP3, MP4, WAV, AAC, AIFF, and FLAC. It handles AVCHD, AVI, DV, MJPEG, MOV, FLV, F4V, VIDEO_TS folder, EyeTV recordings, TiVoToGo transfers, BMP, JPG, GIF, PSD, PDF, PNG, and TIFF. You can also burn ISO image files.
One way Toast makes it easier to get your images, movies and music on disc is by streamlining the capture process. For example, it’s quick to get video direct from an AVCHD camcorder direct to standard DVD, and you can stream video from the internet and burn it straight to DVD for playing in your DVD player. As well as burning to regular CD and DVD, you can fit HD video onto DVD for viewing on a Blu-ray player. This way you can get more video onto the disc. Toast keeps a copy of the HD video you burn to disc, so you can preview it on your Mac.
Copying discs is simple with just a click – Toast is an easy program to use for the simple task of copying discs and it is super-quick with multiple drives. A feature we like is the ability to create custom DVD compilations from collections of DVD movies, fit onto a single disc without losing video quality.
And in order not to lose data, you can transfer files from damaged discs direct to a new disc, along with a list of the files that have been lost. Saving some files is better than none.
Security
No extra security features to report with Roxio Toast.
Features
Video Conversion – Quickly convert video that you get from the web, your camcorder or in DVD-Video format so you can play it on your iPad or iPhone. As you stream to your device you can preview a clip at different video quality settings so you can make sure it will end up at the optimal quality for viewing.
Audio Capture – Toast Audio Assistant allows you to import music and audio from a wide variety of sources including cassette tapes, your Mac’s microphone, LPs, or Internet audio. Burn it directly to CD or add it to your iTunes library.
DVD Authoring – The addition of MyDVD to the Toast package is a welcome one. With MyDVD you can create professional-looking discs by adding customized menus, music, and text. Themed templates make it easier to author a DVD quickly.
Video Sharing – get your video published to Facebook, YouTube or Vimeo and Toast will even Tweet your updates automatically.
Audio Disc Spanning – Burn your music across various CDs with ease. Screen Capture – Record your screen and add voiceover to it with this Toast feature, which is ideal for presentations and projects.
Ease of use
The basic burning and copying features in Roxio Toast Titanium are very easy to use. At all points you can drag and drop files to burn, and easily select the type of disc you want to create. Everything is logically laid out. Also, you can quickly find data you burned through the DiscCatalogMaker which automatically catalogs your discs when you burn them, saving photo thumbnail files to identify and preview the contents. However, the downside of Roxio Toast having so many features is they can be a little overwhelming. On the plus side, video tutorials and other information help you make the most of the extras.
Help & support
Roxio includes a number of support options for customers. The knowledgebase is extensive, although it does cover the entire Roxio product range so it takes a bit of searching, and there are forums and discussion groups for each product. You can contact technical support through an online form and receive a response within 24 hours. Paid priority support is also available from Roxio.
Overall
If you’re simply looking for a basic Mac DVD burner then the collection of features in the Roxio Toast 20 Titanium package will be a little overwhelming. But for those looking for an all-round solution to disc copying, burning and organizing, Toast is ideal. Mac owners will find what they are looking for in Toast 20 Titanium.
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