Has Roxio Gone Too Far with Toast 9?

[terryj]

I saw the upgrade email hit my inbox this morning,
and looking over the new features ( MpegStreamclip like cutting of content,
Blu-Ray HD authoring, Customized DVD Menus, Streaming to another Mac
or Mac Device like Apple TV, more VisualHub like conversions to a variety
of formats), I just had to wonder if Roxio is "jumping the shark"
on what makes Toast great and is going too far with this release?

What do you think?

[rumplestiltskin]

No vote yet. In the past, Toast's video conversions have resulted in videos of poor quality when compared to other tools. If there are enough tweaks available, however....

[lordsmurf]

Too much crap in one program often makes nothing work.

[Frobozz]

That's an odd question and none of the responses fits my perspective. Toast 9 is more useful than Toast 8 because it can do a few more things. It has a much-improved interface because it puts video and audio exporting into an entirely different window from DVD burning. I especially like that it no longer requires extracting MPEGs before exporting from a VIDEO_TS or DVD. The predesigned DVD menus look at lot better, too.

The only things that are lost from Toast 8 are Motion Pictures HD and Deja Vu. The latter is replaced with Get Backup RE. The new Streamer application looks to be a winner but I haven't had time to mess with it yet.

I'm glad to have Toast 9 because I don't need to use both Toast and Popcorn 3 any more. And I like that it has a few new tricks for me to play around with.

[terryj]

But has it jumped the shark brother Fro?

I for one always thought Toast "peaked" with version 7,
and the last few things that would have made the program perfect
would be the ability to customize menus, either by a WYSIWYG
editor interface ( picking title shapes and placing background pictures,
as well as dropping in an 15 sec audio loop) or including
a "Menu Wizard" which would allow step by step editing.

Version 8 gave us a limited facet of that custom ability,
and, although not how I wanted it, I was happy with that.

The problem I have is that it seems that Sonic, in their
thinking, to keep the program alive, wants to compete
with other well established Mac Products.

It wouldn't surprise me if they start touting it as the "iLife" killer,
and you get a Youtube uploader with Toast 9.01.

I'm just sayin'.....

[serega]

Too bad I just got Toast 8 like a week ago....

[Frobozz]

Too bad I just got Toast 8 like a week ago....

If you bought it as a download from Roxio you can get a refund and then purchase the new version. Also, there is a $59.99 upgrade version available for owners of Toast 8, Popcorn 3 or Crunch. Click the upgrade box at the top left of the Roxio home page.

[Frobozz]

But has it jumped the shark brother Fro?

This is a commercial software company and Toast is their meal ticket. Of course they are going to keep tyring to find ways to sell upgrades and that requires finding something worthwhile to add to the product. Whether those additions make it worth shelling out more cash is a personal choice, and I expect that is the point of your survey.

As for video DVD authoring the only difference is newly designed menu templates and a couple more menu customization features such as choosing the background and text colors. There are widescreen menu templates with the HD/Blue-Ray plugin.

I suspect most users who are not concerned with Blu-Ray, Tivo-to-Go or Streamer will find the only big difference is the better user interface.

I, too, wish they had added audio to menus and added audio to DVD slide shows. But I have iDVD and CaptyDVD 2 for that when I need it.

I haven't toyed with the MPEG editor as yet. It is ElGato's MPEG player/editor. I'm glad to have it available as a convenience and hope it works.

Given the low cost of hard drives, the availability of online storage and the emphasis on streaming and sharing media, the future is not in optical discs. If users stop burning discs what would happen to Toast sales? I think that is what is stimulating Roxio to move Toast in the direction it seems to be heading.

A really cool thing I discovered today is you can apply all the audio effects including normalizing levels in the Convert window as well as the Audio CD setting. So these effects can be applied and the track exported for use in iTunes. If you ever have extracted an audio track from a VIDEO_TS and hated the low sound level, it's an easy fix with Toast 9. Normalizing is in Toast 8 too so it may be the same there, but I never tried exporting audio tracks while in the Audio CD window.

[terryj]

Given the low cost of hard drives, the availability of online storage and the emphasis on streaming and sharing media, the future is not in optical discs. If users stop burning discs what would happen to Toast sales? I think that is what is stimulating Roxio to move Toast in the direction it seems to be heading.

But the question becomes, who is making that decision?

Online Storage is still costly.....while there are a few good deals that
can be found if you look, for the average home user on say Cox or Yahoo/AT&T,
they get shafted in their online storage needs. If you wanted to
host or share any movie over 10 to 20MB, forget it.
Even Apple's lauded .Mac, at 8GB for $10 a month is a rip-off,
with better storage options and the fact that .Mac goes down
more than a Hunts Point tranny hooker is a joke.
I tried it myself for podcasting, and trying to even upload
a 50MB mp4 file to the service is a joke, not to mention the download.

Sure, storage is getting cheaper, and new devices like the Apple TV, and the iPod Classic make it
easier to just move data from one place to the next, but no more DVD-Rs?

When online storage is cheap across the board and plentiful ( say, 160GB for $10 a month)
and it's as simple as three clicks ( open the link to storage place, drag the file, close the window...what
.Mac SHOULD be), and there's 100% retention of data, then I'll agree that's the future.

but for now, Plastic is king.....


And your right brother, Roxio has to keep Toast profitable, otherwise it will die.
so, no argument on that one.

[yoda313]

I like the roxio suite that came bundled with my vista desktop. Forgot the exact title but it does burning and ripping and stuff. It works well for doing iso creation and data burning.

Roxio has its place but I still use other applications for specific needs. Like TDA 2.0 for dvd creation and my creative audio software for music needs.

[terryj]

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[broaddd]

While I don't mind new features, they should concentrate on making the video conversions better quality, and I also notice my DVD conversions from avi files play with serious distortion and green bars in DVD Player (although the vob files look fine in VLC)?

More menu options, and less automation of DVD resolutions in converting avis would also be nice - eg. don't go to half-DVD resolution rather than just dropping the bit-rate and doing two-pass instead....