adaptec toast 4 deluxe - Toast 4 Deluxe cd software - Software Review - Evaluation

Emedia Professional, March, 2000 by Stephen F. Nathans

it's a strange time to be Toast. It's not that it isn't still a great product--it is. But its latest version, Toast 4 Deluxe, though a fine successor to and measurable improvement on its forbears, has been born into troubled times. In a sense, Adaptec's Toast has lived a charmed life to date. Mac CD-R has never been the roller-coaster ride that CD recording on the PC has been--it basically worked all along. And Toast deserves a lot of credit for that. Even in CD-R's mid-'90s adolescence, when it had competition--Incat, Corel, Gear, and OMI wing for pieces of the Mac sliver of a very small pie--Toast (then an Astarte product) was always the most deserving and the best fed.

Even when the software was on the shoddy side (besides Astarte, only OMI really put much effort into its Mac product), the Macintosh made them all look good. The Mac only gave you one way to record, and it succeeded remarkably well. And soon enough, all those other contenders were gone, and Toast--the best of the bunch--survived. Moreover, SCSI CD-Recordable drives were arguably the first to mature into anything like the well-oiled machines you see today, and they were the only type of drive that you could connect to a Mac. Best of all, the rigidity of the Mac system saved users from all the fancy footwork PC recordists had to master to shore up their systems (building partitions, switching off background operations, adjusting memory options). Amazingly, with all the advances in PC CD recording technology--from packet writing to wizards--and exponential growth in hard disk size and processor power that should have obviated the need for this kind of damage control, Dana Parker's three-year-old article, "The Seven Rules of Safe CD-R," continues to get our readers out of jams, as the half-dozen letters I get each year singing its praises attest.

With all these factors in its favor (and only one current competitor, Charismac's Discribe, which is only sold in bundles), Adaptec's biggest concern for its Toast line has likely been that the Macintosh platform teetered on the edge of extinction throughout CD-R's greatest period of growth. The arrival of Apple's surprisingly popular iMac, G3, and G4 should have the Toast team breathing a huge collective sigh of relief, since more Mac users must mean more Mac recording, right? I guess so. But with every wish there comes a curse. What should be a renaissance in Mac recording has a pretty upsetting downside: if you leapt too soon into the colorful new Mac scene, you now find yourself saddled with a system that won't even connect to the latest 8X SCSI recorders.

Most iMacs offer only the USB interface, which was made for scanners, printers, and other lower-bandwidth peripherals, and has yet to deliver CD-R reliably over 2X, which is pretty abysmal by today's standards; by comparison, any current desktop PC is capable of 8X recording. The very first PowerMac beige G3s had SCSI, but not so with any Mac brandishing the new multicolored tower design. More recent iMacs and G4s offer FireWire, which is more promising, although largely untested for CD-R to date. Only the very latest G4s solve this problem, offering two drive bays into which you can install just about any kind of drive you want. But if you're among the millions who saw the newfangled boxes and jumped on the first wave, you're stuck with the still-unproven FireWire, or worse, USB.

But none of that is Adaptec's fault. To paraphrase James T. Farrell, Toast 4 has been born into a world it didn't make, and can't be blamed for that world's shortcomings. Adaptec's done some fine tweaking of Toast, and filled in the blanks on any typical CD-R user's wish list based on what's been available in Adaptec's PC tools for the last couple of years. Audio enthusiasts will be encouraged to find a Mac version of the Spin Doctor music-recording tool associated with Easy CD Creator included here, and owners of iMac and G4 systems can rest assured that the USB recorders with which Apple has placed them on a collision course are supported by Toast 4 as well. But FireWire remains such a murky proposition that Toast doesn't support it yet. Adaptec says the software will be upgradable when the drives are available via the WebCheck online upgrade feature introduced with Toast 4. Interestingly, Toast also supports ATAPI now, which is good news if you held off your G4 purchase long enough to avail yourself of a unit with ATAPI capability.

These are welcome developments but predictable ones; somewhat more interesting is what Toast 4 reveals about Adaptec's management plans for the old Astarte recording line, which once included three products: Toast OD-ROM Pro, Toast CD-DA, and Toast CD-Copy. Toast 4 is the first iteration of the general premastering tool to incorporate the CD-Copy utility. However, Jam, Adaptec's renamed and incrementally evolved version of the CD-DA professional audio product, will apparently remain distinct for at least another generation.

Which is hardly surprising either--no current mainstream premastering product includes audio manipulation capabilities as sophisticated as Jam, and the analog-to-digital conversion, "de-clicking" of imported files, digital audio extraction, and pause-setting features included with Spin Doctor should prove fairly satisfying to the audio hobbyist. And those musically inclined CD recordists will also welcome the inclusion of Liquid Audio support and MP3 file conversion, the latter of which seems to become the sine qua non of pursuing CD-R's desired consumer audience. Furthermore, it's the first version of Toast to boast 80-minute media support, which should please all you non-musicians who've been drawn into CD-R audio for, uh, "professional" reasons.