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Toast 11: How Does a Disc Utility Survive in a Future Without Discs?

Geoffrey Goetz — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:01:28 +0000

In a disc-less age, what is a disk burning platform to do besides re-invent itself? The challenge is which way to steer your product. In the case of Roxio and its market-leading disc burning tool Toast, that direction points down two different paths. I’ve long been a Toast user, and recently spent some time with Toast 11, the latest version, focussing on everything but its ability to create optical media.

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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Vuze Brings Easy Video Conversion to Apple Devices, but at What Cost?

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:00:08 +0000

I admit, I am a reformed Azureus user. When I made the transition from Windows to Mac for my primary machine, one hang-up that came with me was my devotion to Azureus, a program which (as I was soon to discover) was fast becoming unnecessarily resource-heavy and bloated, especially compared to lightweight Mac alternatives like Transmission, and more recently, uTorrent. I abandoned Azureus long before it stopped being open source and become Vuze, that Frankenstein beast of a media download manager.

Because I care about you, I actually installed the newly released version of Vuze on my MacBook today, even though it was painful to do so, and my notebook’s fan started working overtime the moment I did. The reason? Vuze now offers a quick and easy way to get video content in to your iTunes library and onto your iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV without getting your hands dirty with complicated conversion software.

It worked like a charm with the Katy Perry fluff piece I downloaded (if I have to endure Vuze, I should get to have some fun at least, right?); the conversion process took very little time and the video was available in my iTunes library immediately afterward. Likewise with a “Fast and Furious” trailer downloaded for the purposes of testing HD conversion, but I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t maintain HD quality during the conversion, since the max resolution supported under iTunes devices is 720×432 for Apple TV.

I suppose it’s very handy if you’re looking to quickly get video onto your portable Apple device, and if you don’t mind finding and/or downloading the file in Vuze (I tried adding a previously downloaded .mkv file to my Vuze library, but could not). And it works very well if you want to convert HD content for playback on your PS3 or Xbox 360, but overall, I don’t think the bargain is worth the price of admission, especially if you’re an advanced enough user to convert your video using HandBrake or some other similar program.

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Techspansion Shutting Down Development of VisualHub/iSquint

Bob Rudis — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:30:38 +0000

Techspansion developer Tyler Loch, maker of the incredibly useful multimedia manipulation tools VisualHub, iSquint and AudialHub, has announced he is discontinuing all further development.

“…After much soul-searching (it’s not you, it’s me), for personal reasons, Techspansion is closing its virtual doors. The Support Forum and Support E-mail will be available for a while longer to take care of any remaining issues for you. “

Thanks for all your support. It’s been a fun ride.

This has been the main tool I use to convert content for the iPhone & Apple TV and the continued enhancements will be sorely missed, especially if Apple patches or new OS releases cause the software to break.

While there are other programs out there, VisualHub provided a clean interface with very helpful pre-sets that made it a snap to do batch conversions. Tyler was always very helpful with support questions and seems to truly appreciate his user community.

What will replace Techspansion tools in your Applications folder? What are your key conversion utilities? How will the loss of these applications impact your workflow? Drop a note in the comments with your suggestions for other TAB readers or just to say “thank you!” to Tyler for his contribution to the Mac community.

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