Roxio on Tuesday will announce support for Blu-ray Disc with Toast, its popular Macintosh CD and DVD burning software. The new release of Toast will be bundled with Blu-ray drives coming to retailers soon.
The software will enable Mac users who purchase Blu-ray drives to store as much as 50GB of data on a BD-R (recordable) or BD-RE (rewritable) disc, according to Roxio. Those drives will be coming to market later this calendar quarter. Adam Fingerman, director of product management for Roxio, told Macworld that several companies have spoken with or made arrangements with Roxio to bundle the Blu-ray-enabled version of Toast.
The new update to Toast will, at least at first, be available exclusively to users who buy the new BD drives, and won’t offer any additional functionality or features for non-Blu-ray drive users. Blu-ray drive users will receive the full Toast Titanium product, not a “Lite” version.
Left to its own devices, Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” doesn’t know what to do with Blu-ray Discs, so Toast will include Toast Dynamic Writing, software that lets users mount Blu-ray discs and write to the them the same way they would a removable storage device. What’s more, the data isn’t cached on the hard disk first — so you needn’t worry about allocating 50GB of disk space before you can burn Blu-ray media.