One path Toast is taking is to focus on its core strengths and make use of its encoding and decoding expertise by becoming a media conversion utility. The second direction appears to be more of a business partnership move, through the creation of a software bundle with other vendors whose programs complement Toast.

Toast as a Media Converter

Out of the box, Toast is a decent media conversion tool. I compared it to two other media conversion tools that I use regularly, the well-established Handbrake, and the lesser-known Pavtube, to see just how good it is. As you can see from the chart above, it lags behind Handbrake and Pavtube in terms of its ability to take content directly from disc-based sources and create different files using those sources. It also lacks a lot of fine-tuning options and the ability to queue conversions. Still, with a little more work, it could become a very competitive conversion tool thanks to its extensive output format support.

Toast as a Complementary Utility

By placing more of an emphasis on conversion than burning, Toast has entered into the media conversion market with a decent offering. On its own, Toast isn’t exactly a powerhouse of creativity. Sure you can create a DVD menu system, but for the most part, the creativity happens outside of Toast itself. To that end, Toast Titanium Pro has partnered with some other software developers to create a bundle of utilities that complement the creativity process of established media creation powerhouses.

Roxio has been very careful to choose what software to bundle in with Toast Pro.  They didn’t directly challenge iMovie, Premier or Final Cut by resurrecting some of Avid’s now retired consumer-based products for Mac.  Instead, Roxio made the smart move with Toast to focus on complementary tools that fill the creativity void it has in this space.  Boinx Software’s FotoMagico is a great choice to author clips that will be added to a movie.  BIAS SoundSoap helps remove unwanted background noise from videos.  SmartSound SonicFire adds the ability to create great soundtracks if you are not a musician.  Combine that with Toast’s existing burn and conversion capabilities, and you have a powerful set of media creation utilities.

Looking the core value of Toast in a disc-challenged world, if Roxio sees fit to expand Toast’s conversion features to handle a little more control on some of the low-level settings like de-interlacing and noise reduction, as well as add in the ability to process a batch of media files in series or in parallel, it has the opportunity of being the best media conversion utility on the market. Unfortunately, Toast’s current strengths lie in its Pro version and its strategic business partnerships. I would definitely recommend purchasing the Pro version of Toast over upgrading to the latest version of iLife or investing in Adobe Premier, but if you want conversion tools, look elsewhere for now.

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You’d be mistaken for assuming that copying a music CD couldn’t be more complicated than copying a data disc. Well, it is, especially on a Mac. While Windows solutions like Exact Audio Copy (EAC) have long been cited as the gold standard for audio backups, a Mac version doesn’t exist. But I’ve come to find the abilities of the awesome, free X Lossless Decoder (XLD) on the Mac to be on par with those of EAC on the PC. XLD is the star of the first two methods below, while iTunes rounds out the list.

XLD: Best for Audiophile Digital Packrats

The big difference between using XLD and just using iTunes to rip a CD lies in the implementation of what is called Secure Ripping. Put simply, all optical discs (CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays) can become damaged.  Inherent in the design of a disc is the ability to rebuild lost data segments due to physical damage.  This built-in error correction capability can be exploited to make extremely accurate reproductions of the original audio stored on the disc.  The technique employed to securely rip a CD typically involves reading each segment of the disk multiple times, comparing the results of each read over and over until the ripping software is satisfied that it has an accurate representation of the original audio data.  When there’s an error, the ripping software attempts to rebuild the missing data segment. These results can be further analyzed against a database of other ripped tracks such as AccurateRip. Both EAC and XLD employ these secure ripping techniques and verify their results via AccurateRip for the best possible audio fidelity.

To decode a disk using XLD on the Mac you need to:

1. Download, install and launch XLD.
2. Open XLD Preferences (From the menu bar, XLD > Preferences).
3. On the General tab, select the output format you want the disc ripped to. Choose a format like Apple Lossless to retain the full quality of the original music.
4. On the CD Rip tab, select the ripping options you want to rip the disk with. Here you have the choice between CD Paranoia III 10.2 and XLD’s own Secure Ripper implementation. Either should be fine. Be sure to check the “Use C2 error pointers” option if your drive supports it.
5. Insert your album and select Open Audio CD from the File menu, you should see the name of the CD in a sub menu. Select it.
6. From the CDDB menu, click on Get CD Track Names to retrieve the album information from freedb.org.
7. Select “Include pre-gap for all tracks” and click on Decode. You’ll be prompted for a location to save your ripped music to.

Note that in order to add album art, you’ll need to download the image file separately and add it manually. Ripping in this secure manner will take a little longer than other ripping methods.  This is, again, due to how the information is being read, verified and corrected before decoding.

Now you have backups of your music on your hard drive, ready to add to your iTunes collection. But Unlike EAC, XLD can’t take your backed-up music files and perfectly recreate a disc-based copy complete with the same file structure and sound quality. But just because XLD can’t do it doesn’t make it impossible.

XLD + Toast: Best for Audiophiles Who Want It All

Enter Roxio Toast, a program that allows you to make copies of audio CDs or back them up as image files. You have several copy options available to you with Toast.  You can copy the CD directly, save the album as a Sound Designer II image file, or save the CD as a binary copy with a cue sheet (BIN/CUE).  If you choose to create a BIN/CUE copy of the music CD on your hard drive, you can then use XLD later to decode the image and create individual music files for each track, or use your BIN/CUE version to create an exact replica using a CD-R. That way, you’ll have a burnable perfect copy of your disc, and files for your iTunes library. To do this, you need to:

1. Download, install and launch Toast.
2. Select the Copy tab in Toast and choose Disc Copy.
3. In Toast’s Options box in the bottom left hand corner of the window, check “Use Disc Recovery”.
4. From Toast’s File Menu, choose Save as Bin/Cue…
5. Choose the save location for the resulting image files.
6. Once this process is complete, launch XLD and open Preferences from the XLD menu.
7. On XLD’s General tab, select the output format you want the disc ripped as.
8. From XLD’s File menu, choose Open Raw PCM (bin+cue)…
9. Navigate to the image file you saved from Toast in step 5 above.
10. From the CDDB menu, click on Get CD Track Names to retrieve the album information from freedb.org.
11. Select “Exclude pre-gap (incompatible with AccurateRip)” and click on Decode, you will be prompted for a location to save your ripped music to.

Again, in order to add album art, you will need to download the image file separately and add it manually.

iTunes: Best for the Casual Music Fan

The final, and simplest option, is to use iTunes and simply encode a music CD using Apple’s Lossless encoder directly from within iTunes itself.  iTunes can be configured to export many of the same audio formats as XLD.  iTunes also has the option to use error correction when reading Audio CDs. This is all relatively easy to configure via the Import Settings of the General tab within iTunes Preferences.  You can even burn a high-quality Music CD from within iTunes.

While it may all sound very good, this method likely won’t result in an exact copy of the original music CD.  Any time you decode an album and then take the decoded files in some other audio format and burn it back onto a CD-R, you jeopardize the integrity of the disc’s structure as well as the audio quality itself. Which method you end up choosing really boils down to how exact you want your copies to be.

If you’re in the market for a DVD/CD burning solution for your Mac, you may be interested to hear that Freeridecoding has released an update to BurnAgain FS.

The app is a CD/DVD multisession burning utility for Mac OS X, making it possible to repeatedly change the content of a data CD or DVD directly in the Finder. You can re-mount a CD or DVD as you would a USB drive to add, change or remove files. Disks burned with BurnAgain FS are readable without additional software on all platforms. As BurnAgain FS doesn’t erase the disk each time, changing the content of the media is much faster than burning a new disk.

It provides a great way to make CD burning a whole lot more useful, rather than treating disks as a use-once throwaway commodity.

The update to 1.2 brings several important improvements to the application including interface enhancements that make BurnAgain FS even easier to use, improved handling of file permissions, improved reliability when renaming or moving large number of files, overall improved performance and the option to disable the creation of AppleDouble files.

A few of the highlights cited by the developer include:

• Burn multiple sessions without creating multiple volumes
• Change the content of a CD/DVD like on a hardisk
• Change disk title at each burn
• Preserve Mac file attributes
• Platform independent format

The software doesn’t erase the disk during the burn, it just adds new or changed content and overwrites the removed items to make them inaccessible. While using a little more space, it makes the process of editing and updating files much more efficient. This explains why the app is also able to support CD-R disks as well as CD-RW.

Requirements and Pricing

BurnAgain FS requires OS X Tiger or later, and an Apple supported CD/DVD Writer (it doesn’t necessarily need to be a SuperDrive). It comes in both English and German, priced at $22 for a home license and $48 for a family license (up to 5 installations). Business and educational discounts are also available.

To make sure you find the software useful, the trial download will allow you to test it out with 20 trial burns before requiring you make a purchase. Full details and the download can be found at the app’s website.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on how useful software such as this is. Does a demand exist for using CD/DVD’s in such a way with inexpensive USB keys now on the market? I wish I’d come across BurnAgain a few years ago before removable storage was so widely available!

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Program features include:

• ability to change the content like on a hard-drive
• ability to change disk title at each burn
• preservation of all OS X resource forks
• burns in a completely platform independent format
• fully usable with CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RW

From my very limited testing with a DVD+RW I can say that the product behaves as advertised. I’ll run it through some more paces with some CD-R/RW media will report any quirks. You get 20 free burns and then need to pay $23 USD for a single user license if you want to keep using the product. Users of BurnAgain DVD (since January 1^st, 2008) receive a discount if they choose to upgrade.

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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