What is Toast 5 Titanium?

The preferred CD (and later DVD) burner for Macintosh.

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With the introduction of Apple's iTunes and new Macs with built-in CD-RW drives, you might think there's little reason to purchase a separate application for making audio and data CDs. But burning CDs today is not the straightforward, utilitarian task it was just a few months ago. With Toast Titanium 5, you can make not only CDs but also DVDs and Video CDs (VCDs), and you can record and clean up audio from analog sources.

Toast is basically an application for burning CDs. Even with the demise (more or less) of Napster, songs in MP3 format will remain available, and Toast makes it easy to turn these songs into a CD you can play on any consumer CD player. Toast can also create backups of files and folders from your computer onto CDs. The program does these tasks well — without hassle, without bugs, and with one of the simplest and most intuitive Interfaces we've seen. Toast Titanium deserves a Freakin' Awesome rating just for that.

The latest version of Toast adds features that set new standards in CD burning. One of these is the ability to create VCDs — videos burned to CD-R media that most consumer DVD players can view (think of VCD as low-budget iDVD). This feature adds functionality to Apple's iMovie software. When you Install Toast Titanium, any application that has a QuickTime export feature — including iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and QuickTime Pro Player — will have a Toast VCD file-format option. This means you can translate these movies into a VCD-compatible format, burn them in Toast, and play them on a DVD player. If you want to put a simple QuickTime movie on a VCD, just drag the file onto the application window and let Toast convert it to a VCD-compatible format — no other software required. (Note that Toast can't convert some MPEG movies via Export; you’ll need a program such as Terran Cleaner 5 for this).

With the previous version of Toast, if you wanted to burn a CD you had to get up from your chair and find something else to do while your Mac burned the disc. Even with the fastest CD-R drive, a 650MB CD burn lasted for the duration of a good-size cup of coffee. Those days are over, because Toast 5 can now burn your CDs in the background. We successfully burned an audio CD while running SETI@Home (a program for analyzing telescope radio data), surfing the Web, and checking email. Long-time Toast users will find this feature an impressive addition. Unfortunately, it also means you can't use “I’m burning right now” as an excuse to avoid work.

Background burning has additional undocumented advantages. If you have two CD burners, you can make a copy of the Toast application and burn two different CDs at the same time. In our tests, we successfully burned a copy of The Disc and the soundtrack to The Fifth Element while running SETI@Home and surfing. That may sound pretty astonishing to people who have burned CDs before, but Roxio claims you're not limited to just two CD burners for multiple, simultaneous burn sessions.

Roxio has done an amazing job with the new upgrade, and the price is just right. Anyone investing in a CD-RW should get this program. If you buy one of the new G4's with the built-in SuperDrive for DVD burning. Toast Titanium is waiting to do the job.

Tokuda, Andrew. (June 2001). Toast Titanium 5. MacAddict. (pg. 51).

Download Toast 5 Titanium for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.6 up to Mac OS 10.4

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC

Version 5.0.2 requires Mac OS 8.6 - 9.2.2

Version 5.2.3 requires Mac OS 9.1 - 9.2.2 or Mac OS X 10.1.2 - 10.4.11

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver