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

Emedia Professional, March, 2000 by Stephen F. Nathans

The more prominent audio boost in today's Toast comes from CD Spin Doctor, the multifaceted consumer audio recording tool introduced with Adaptec's initial Easy CD Creator rollout in 1997. Its inclusion with Toast has been a long time coming, as there's really been no retail tool for doing the types of things that's made Spin Doctor so popular, namely analog-to-digital conversion for burning tracks from vinyl and tapes onto CD. Users can import audio from just about any source they can plug into the RCA jack on the rear of their Mac, provided it has stereo input (nearly all PowerPCs and all iMacs, G3s, and G4s do have this feature; 68K users are out of luck--Spin Doctor won't even run on a sub-PowerPC Mac). And it's a welcome addition to the mainstream tool; previously, Mac users had to scour the Web for tools like SoundHack to get this capability.

Another nice feature of CD Spin Doctor (also available in the Easy CD Creator version) is its basic audio-restoration functions--rapid de-clicking, de-popping, and elemental boosting of inferior-sounding tracks--that can indeed work some minor wonders in erasing the imprint of time on degradable music-distribution media. If you haven't used this kind of thing before, it'll take some tinkering to get it right. The well-wrought User's Guide included in the Toast bundle does a fairly good job of walking you through the process, but nothing serves better for this kind of operation than good old trial and error. Your initial experiments may result in all kinds of bass-boosted distortion; be sure you duplicate the track you loaded in before fussing with it because Spin Doctor automatically overwrites the original version with the modified track.

Working from a click-cluttered CD of '50s doo-wop songs made a couple years back from a stack of old 45s, I ran some 29 songs through the Spin Doctor mill with some impressive results, especially on a couple of tunes where the crackling had persisted the whole way through. Efforts to boost the sound on more quietly recorded tracks proved less successful.

What's most interesting about the Toast version of Spin Doctor is not what's included, but rather what they left out. I said that adding Spin Doctor was a well-calculated mainstream move and, indeed, this is decidedly consumer stuff: while the PC version of Spin Doctor offers some very rudimentary track editing, like fade ins, fade outs, and cross-fades, these are nowhere to be found on the Mac side. It's not that Adaptec can't do it--far from it. These features remain the exclusive province of Jam, Adaptec's similarly Astarte-derived professional music editing and recording product. This is good news and bad news. While it's disappointing that even a "lite" version of this feature set was not included in this release (say, missing the dizzying array of options you get with Jam), it's heartening to imagine this omission as a clue to Adaptec's having a new Jam in the works. Here's hoping they do and that they release it soon; Jam 2.5's lack of support for just about any recorder released since the mid-'90s demands attention that Adaptec has been sorely remiss in not providing thus far.