Although Roxio Inc. chose to sit out exhibiting at this week’s Macworld CreativePro Conference & Expo, a company representative was on-hand to provide MacCentral with a sneak peek at Toast 6 Titanium, a significant advance in the company’s popular CD and DVD burning software for the Macintosh.
Currently in development and expected for release in early September, Toast 6 Titanium leaves very few stones unturned in the areas of interface, features and functionality. The new version of Toast sports a Universal Audio Converter that enables users to drag and drop nearly any audio file or iTunes track into the software to be recorded to audio and enhanced audio CDs. If you’re transferring your collection of vintage vinyl to CD, Roxio has also completely re-engineered Spin Doctor, the analog-to-digital conversion software. New artwork lets you create personalized disc labels, case covers and inserts too.
Roxio has also extensively reworked the way that Toast works with photos and video. A new Motion Pictures feature lets you turn collections of still photos into galleries containing pan and zoom-style effects, crossfades and soundtracks. And what’s more, the software supports drag and drop directly from either your hard drive or iPhoto library. The pictures can be turned into full-screen slide shows on Video CD, Super Video CD or DVD.
Video CDs, Super Video CDs and DVDs can be created with menus, buttons and chapters, as well. Like the Universal Audio Converter, Toast 6 Titanium’s Universal Video Converter allows users to drag and drop different video file formats — even iMovie creations — directly into Toast.
The software’s graphical user interface has been reworked as well, and makes use of improvements implemented with Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar’s” release. And Toast 6 Titanium now sports a “QuickRecord” feature that lets you bypass many of the steps prior to and after recording your disc.
Toast 6 Titanium’s compatibility has been expanded to “nearly all” CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW and DVD-RAM recorders, according to Roxio, and it fully supports all CD-R, CD-RW, Combo and DVD SuperDrives included with Apple hardware.
System requirements for the forthcoming version of Toast call for a G3 or later; Mac OS X 10.2 or higher; 200MB free hard disk space; QuickTime 6 or later; a CD or DVD recorder, and recordable media.
Expect to hear more about Toast 6 Titanium’s new features in the coming weeks. Roxio said it has east and west coast launch events planned for Toast 6 Titanium’s release in September, as well.
Toast 6 Titanium will retail for US$99, and an upgrade path will be provided for users of the current Toast 5 Titanium product as well.