ts files and assemble them into a DVD playable on a standard DVD player. You can burn a video CD, Divx DVD and even collect video and audio. Most notable among them is the video projects on offer. Where the old versions gave you the choice between writing or copying music or data discs, the dropdown project menu in the application window now has a host of project types and formats. It’s a neat enough idea, but if you have any more than eight photos or songs in your collection it’s very unwieldy to sift through them all in one long list to find the ones you want to burn. The most visible is the floating media browser, a palette that lets you view your digital content by category, be it iTunes tracks, iPhoto images, movies or a file navigator. Publisher Roxio has combated the threat of obsolescence by bundling Toast with more extras than ever before.
While burning, the whole application window collapses to a graphic that reports on the progress of your burning project with an ‘abort’ button affixed. That process has changed little, but Toast Titanium 8 has undergone a facelift while it conducts familiar tasks. As the Mac now has disc burning from within the Finder, Toast has a lot more competition than it used to so has had to evolve beyond merely burning to disc. Toast used to be the staple application for burning data and media onto discs for the Macintosh, but every digital media management application comes with a burn to disc option nowadays.