Still Hungry for Toast
Saturday, February 17th, 2007
I was excited about Disco when I first heard about it. Now that the 1.0 release is available, I gave it a spin. Now, I had already tried previous beta versions, and had trouble (when burning an audio CD, it completely ignored my ordering and put the tracks in its own order.) But after all that beta-testing, 1.0 should be bug-free and ready to go, right?
First run: Disco stopped responding 82% through a burn. It did finish burning however, I knew this because the disc mounted on the desktop when it was finished. But Disco and its smoke was just staring at me, motionless, at 82%.
After force quitting and re-opening Disco, I tried an audio CD. Disco doesn’t have a iLife-esque media browser, and dragging songs from iTunes doesn’t work either. So I was forced to find and drag the song files from the Finder. After my playlist was ready, I made sure to choose the audio CD setting, and I clicked burn. I inserted a blank disc, which apparently was a faulty disc. Disco told me that I’ve successfully created a coaster. It prompted me to insert another disc, so I did. And it burned successfully. Only it didn’t burn an audio CD, like I requested, it burned an MP3 CD! Just great. Now I have 2 coasters.
After all my trouble, I think I’ll just stick with my smokeless Toast.
Nick Santilli of The Apple Blog writes:
Roxio - in my opinion - has been hanging on by a fingernail
Hanging on by a fingernail? By being the first app to bring Blu-Ray burning to the Mac?
But I’m sure there are some good features in there that merit a $100 price tag.
There sure are! Like creating DVD Video discs from any video file, recorder sharing across networked Macs, EyeTV and TiVo support, crossfades and effects between tracks on audio discs, real disc spanning by splitting files too large for your media, etc…
Toast does pretty much everything you can think of, except smoke. Although, Toast 8’s interface is more animated that previous releases. And… the CD’s in the dock icon lower themselves into the toaster when burning, and pop up when finished. It’s quite cool.
Toast costs a bit more, but remember: you get what you pay for.
