Roxio, the digital media branch of Adaptec, announced Toast 5 Titanium (no direct relation to the Titanium PowerBook), the latest version of the popular CD mastering software for CD-Recordable and CD-Rewritable drives, at this week’s Macworld San Francisco.
Toast enables Macintosh users to use CD-R and CD-RW drives to write data to recordable CD media. Toast supports USB, SCSI and FireWire drives, and provides support for a variety of different data formats as well, including CD Audio. A special version of Toast is bundled with a variety of different CD-R drives from various manufacturers.
And guess what? The new version has a totally new user interface specifically designed for use on Mac OS X. Plus, it also adds the ability to burn CDs in the background while doing other tasks, MPEG encoding for burning iMovies onto VideoCDs for playback in most DVD players, and support for most DVD-RAM and DVD-R/RW drives.
Toast 5 Titanium now includes all the tools needed for complete CD mastering, according to Tom Shea, chief operating officer at Roxio. Those tools include iView Multimedia, which lets you organize images, photos, movies, sounds, fonts and files. Users can also create thumbnail catalogs, create slide shows and video postcards, or publish Web galleries of your media on the Internet. And there’s QDesign MVP, a digital media player that allows you to encode and convert songs from one format to another, playback music and video files, and create and manage play lists.
What’s more, Toast 5 Titanium lets you turn LPs into CDs with CD Spin Doctor. With CD Spin Doctor, users can eliminate noises, pops and hisses from old LPs, while boosting the bass and treble, said Shea. Once a music CD is burned, you can create a custom CD label using Discus from Magic Mouse. This label-printing program includes hundreds of background graphics and useful clip art images and supports over 22 different brands of CD labeling paper. Still not enough? Okay. Toast 5 Titanium also includes sample MP3 songs, digital photos from the photographer James Beal, and sample video clips.
Toast 5 Titanium will be available in the U.S. in early spring at a suggested retail price of US$99. Customers who purchase Toast 4 Deluxe after Jan. 9 will be entitled to an upgrade to Toast 5 Titanium at a “minimal cost” (though Roxio hasn’t said what this will be). Existing registered customers of Toast 4 Deluxe can sign up to be notified by e-mail when Toast 5 Titanium is shipping or can obtain more information by visiting the Toast 5 Titanium site.