bit-tech Shopping: Sonic Solutions Toast 8 Titanium

Rating: 2

Time with product:

Strengths: Supports Blue ray

Weaknesses: Cost and not good reliability on the rebate ... Audio/Video Sync Problem

Summary: Toast 8 is probably the biggest overrated software I have ever had. The hype is over NOTHING, especially not worth $100 and the headache with the rebates. Sometimes it freezes taking over two hours to burn a single DVD! To make matters worst, I was not given the rebate promised by Roxio. Locally the store I bought it it, refunded me the rebate. By the way, calling their customer service is useless as they will say it is your system... No wonder...

Rating: 10

Time with product: 45

Strengths: Ease of use, Blue-Ray support, TiVo Downloading

Weaknesses: Cost

Summary: Toast provides a easy to use way to manage CDs/DVDs. I find the software easy to use and powerful. As an added bonus TiVo users can move TV shows to their computer to view them, burn them or export them to portable devices (iPod touch). Toast supports all the various media formats has a long history with Apple. Shop around to find the best price and look for potential rebates to help ease the purchase price.

Rating: 2

Time with product: 8 Days

Strengths: burns at 8x speed on a new lacie 18x writer

Weaknesses: tons of vague errors, HARDWARE ERROR, SENSE KEY ERROR, INTERFACE ERROR, verifying finds errors, etc.

Summary: I have been trying unsuccessfully to get my Lacie 18x writer to write some photo DVD-R's (Fujifilm DVD-R, 4.7, 16x) from my macbook pro(2.16dual intel, 10.4.11).I have been happy with toast in the past but I cannot use "best" speed setting. (bottom right is set to "DVD"). I also cannot use the 12x speed. I had to set the speed to 8x just to get a dvd written. I wasted hours and 8 dvd-r's.I had so many errors: HARDWARE ERROR, SENSE KEY ERROR etc.This is not acceptable. Why can't the software driving the process check for speed and just work? Why buy an 18x drive if all you can burn is 8x?-lino

Rating: 10

Time with product: 6 Days

Strengths: Multiple disc data spanning feature, fit to disc feature for DVDs, Tivo network transfers

Weaknesses: No real weaknesses

Summary: The most full featured DVD/CD burning software for the Macintosh by far. Great UI that keeps improving over time. Have used it on both a laptop and desktop with no coasters on either. Does everything I need and I especially make use of the multiple disc data spanning feature (for Macs and PCs), which I tested on a Mac. It adds a little program onto the disc that gives you the full file view of the entire disc set and instructs you on which disc in the set to insert. Would be nice to be able to mix up the media types for this feature as sometimes you'll end up with the last DVD in the set only containing a small amount of data that would fit better onto a CD, but this is hardly anything to complain about.Included Deja Vu backup software (basically a psync UI in the form of a system preference pane) is also fairly useful.Overall the best burning software I have used.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 5

Strengths: Support for all types of media, simple user interface, built in finder support

Weaknesses: None

Summary: This product makes creating your own CDs & DVDs simple and painless. A multitude of features allowing you to do most anything with recordable media. And now with Bluray support, all that is missing is Bluray drives for the Mac which should be resolved by the end of January 2008.