Introduction and HistoryToast 8 Titanium is the latest version of the venerable CD/DVD-burning software for Mac. Toast’s history goes back more than a decade; it was originally developed by Dr. Markus Fest and distributed by Astarte as an expensive, high-end application before CD burners were common devices. In 1997 Astarte sold Toast to Adaptec, which continued development and brought it to Mac OS X with version 5.1 in 2001. It was then transferred to Adaptec’s software division, Roxio, which continues selling it to this day.
After leading the market, creating cross-platform hybrid discs and supporting esoteric formats, such as CD-i, Toast 6’s only notable features were mediocre DVD authoring and CD burner sharing over the network. Emerging competition in the market appeared to spur Roxio to radically enhance Toast 7, adding support for Divx, Music DVDs and more. (We reviewed Toast 7 in late 2005.)
After successfully launching Toast 7, Roxio’s developers were clearly not content to rest on their well-deserved laurels, and they have completely overhauled Toast 8, which features a streamlined user interface and tons of new and enhanced functionality.
Toast 8 also includes Deja Vu backup software, CD Spin Doctor, Disc Cover, and Motion Pictures HD. DiscCatalogMaker is a welcome new addition to the Toast family. All are Universal binaries running natively on Intel Macs, except for Motion Pictures HD, which is unchanged, except for a 0.0.1 version increment,and runs under Rosetta on Intel Macs.
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