[jbmth]

OK, this is one of the few areas where I am able to do things more efficiently on Windows versus Mac OS X.
With Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator on a PC (thrown in as a freebee with many burners) I can burn a CD-R and then later come back and essentially update a file. I insert the previously burned CD, fire up Easy CD & DVD Creator (the Creator Classic module), and drag the updated file from Windows Explorer to the lower-right pane. At that point the files previously written to the CD appear in the lower-right pane. The newly dragged file can be placed in any folder. If dragged to the original location, the file is replaced.
This functionality is so basic, yet I've not been able to duplicate in on my Mac ... with Toast or otherwise.
Please tell me I'm missing something obvious. I hate it when Im more efficient on Windows.

[Machound]

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Toast 6 Titanium is garbage.

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Sorry to say it, Steve333, but this is a review of Toast 7 Titanium, not Toast 6. I skipped Toast 6 because of its many shortcomings but now it seems Roxio is putting some energy into Toast again. The prompt 7.01 release is an encouaging sign that they want to keep this program viable, though I'm not sure 7.01 actually fixed very much... just some localizations, documentation and a couple minor patches.
I'd like to see Roxio hold the high ground that Adaptec had in Toast's early days. It seems Roxio is trying harder lately. Hopefully they'll keep the effort going to fix inevitable bugs and misfeatures over the months and years ahead.
For my own needs, I've pretty much decided to buy Toast 7 to convert our family DV videos to DivX format. I'd still like to know how well it does at transcoding 1080i MPEG2_TS (ATSC TV) streams to 720p DivX. No reliable source has mentioned anything about 1080i conversion quality or transcode times. I have hundreds of gigabytes of such content spread over 7-8 hard drives. Most of it is view-once-then-discard stuff but there are a few programs I'd like to keep for the longer term. I hope to pick up one of the (rumored) forthcoming 1.5 GHz DL-DVD Minis to do such conversions without tying up my Powerbook for days at a time. That's when Toast 7 will come in handy.

[Machound]

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OK, this is one of the few areas where I am able to do things more efficiently on Windows versus Mac OS X.

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Jbmth,
What you're talking about is multisession format. I was burning & reading multisession CDs back in the mid-1990's on my Mac in OS 8.1 using Toast 3.x and Adaptec DirectCD. The problem with multisession CDs is they are more prone to catastrophic data failure. Each "session" adds new data to the CD, essentially updating a few files and adding a new directory that points at the added files plus the older unmodified files. The earlier files aren't overwritten, as on a hard drive -- they're merely harder to find (unless you know how to dig into the old directory structure). So, with multisession the original data remains on the CD though it's no longer accessible without using special recovery tools, or unless you're a real expert in reading B-trees and catalog structures.
DirectCD took the process a step further with the UDF format, allowing CDs to be burned and updated from the MacOS 8.x desktop using the familiar drag-and-drop metaphor, even letting you "remove" files from CDs by dragging them to the trash. Fortunately or unfortunately it never really caught on for Mac and Adaptec discontinued development of DirectCD for Mac after version 1.0.3 (if memory serves me. I think it's up to 3.x on Windows.)
In order to protect one of these multisession CDs from data loss you have to "close the session." That's where trouble can happen. Write errors during closing occur not uncommonly, resulting in total data loss. What's different from ordinary burn failures is this problem may occur months or years after the original multisession CD was started. The original files may well have been deleted from a person's hard drive by someone who wasn't saavy about the shortcomings of multisesson format. After enough people had bad experiences with multisession format, and as media prices dropped through the floor, multisession CDs began to lose favor on the Mac. There just wasn't the same motivation for people to squeeze every last megabyte out of a CD that costs 10 cents, versus 1x nonrewritable CDs that were $15-25 each.
For some reason not totally clear to me, multisession CDs remain popular in the Windows world. Sure, they have some advantages. But the potential for catastrophic data loss remains a serious problem. I hope everyone who works with multisession format knows the risks they are taking with their data, but I fear that's not the case. While it may be ok for "quick and dirty" CD creation, it's really not reliable enough for archiving critical data.
And that, to the best of my recollection, is the sorry history of multisession CDs on the Mac.

[Netizen_Kane]

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Actually, there is a FREE program that will do both adaptive deinterlacing and inverse telecine. It's called JES Deinterlacer and it's been available for several years now. JES Deinterlacer does a number of different tasks -- deinterlacing, inverse telecine, standards conversion (NTSC to/from PAL), and field dominance reversal. It's completely free and works on just about any version of Mac OS X. You'll also want to download JES Video Cleaner (also free). You can get both at VersionTracker.com.

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I tried that a couple of months ago. It doesn't do the job well or intuitively. Then again, most tools on the PC side aren't intuitive, either (yes, I'm looking at you, AviSynth!). But at least they work.

[macuser25]

Toast does multi-session CDs just fine. It doesn't do multi-session DVDs because the Mac OS Finder can't read multi-session DVDs... so no point in writing them on the Mac.
It doesn't do packet writing to CD or DVD... the DirectCD thing... since that also isn't a Mac OS Finder supported disc type, and you couldn't read the discs then.
Re: Toast 6 VCD issues... I had it for 2 years and probably produced 100 of them... lots of people seem to have had success with this too... Toast 7 is light years ahead of 6 on the video side.

[ncj37]

Netizen_Kane, originally you claimed:

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I'm annoyed that there's no inverse telecine feature here or, for that matter, anywhere else in the Mac world

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Then in a second post about JES Deinterlacer (which offers inverse telecine) you said:

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I tried that a couple of months ago. It doesn't do the job well or intuitively.

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I guess you should have originally said you didn't like any of the inverse telecine solutions that were available on the Mac, not that there were none available -- big difference. Also, as someone else pointed out JES Deinterlacer is not the only product that offers inverse telecine capabilities.
As for JES Deinterlacer's inverse telecine feature, in my hands it works quite well. In fact, it goes beyond just acceptable in an attempt to automatically correct for cadence breaks in the telecine stream. Also, since it's completely free and comes with documentation I don't see why you would dismiss it so casually. It works, it's not perfect (what is?), but it does work and I do not find it difficult to use.

[whitedog]

I recently bought Toast 7. Though Jam is not available in a package deal as it was with Toast 6, Jam 6 is still available and, so I've been told, works just fine with Toast 7, though I haven't tested it yet.
Toast 6 may have been buggy for some people with high-end needs, but for day to day burning it worked well for me most of the time. I remember the bad old days with Toast 3 and 4, where I burned as many coasters as successful CDs. No doubt the improved performance has a lot to do with the superior memory management in OS X - I regularly do other work on my dual 1 GHz G4 Mac while burning a CD or DVD now, with no hesitation or anxiety. I would never do such a thing in OS 9. The fact that RAM is more abundant and that processors and the system bus are much faster probably helps to.
With Toast 7 I may finally start using some of its more advanced features.

[NotarySojac]

> As for JES Deinterlacer's inverse telecine feature, in my hands it works quite well. In fact, it goes beyond just acceptable in an attempt to automatically correct for cadence breaks in the telecine stream. Also, since it's completely free and comes with documentation I don't see why you would dismiss it so casually. It works, it's not perfect (what is?), but it does work and I do not find it difficult to use.
I am still not sure from this thread what "inverse telecine" is referring to. Is telecine the process of changing a video's frame rate as in going from PAL to NTSC?
We had been struggling for over a year to convert PAL media to NTSC so we could share it with friends who did not have multi-system players (some Aussie shows are just never going to make it to Region 1 DVD....) JES Deinterlacer looked like it would handle the job (especially after the poor results I had with MPEG2 Works) but I could never get it to work even with the developer's help. We finally dropped the $$$ and bought DVfilm's Atlantis which to our eyes does a beautiful job.

[sjk]

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So assuming this version of Toast lets you burn many hours of vcd/svcd to DVD media, will a dvd player play it?

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I think I was burning about six hours of EyeTV USB MPEG-1 recordings to DVD-R(W) media with Toast 6. I doubt there's any difference for that with Toast 7, unless you want to use its "Popcorn-style" compression. Playback is fine on my old Pioneer DVD player.
To steve333, opinion or not, calling Toast 6 "garbage" just because you couldn't get it to work successfully is an immature generalization and a detraction from any useful comments you may have written. I don't know what your problem was/is but I never had trouble burning MPEG-1 EyeTV recordings and other "miscellaneous" video files to CD-R(W) media with Toast 6. Btw, I wouldn't waste time mailing Roxio; their discussion forum is a much better support resource for their products.

[sjk]

One of my few remaining issues with Toast is weak support for DTS audio. Apparently DVD Studio Pro 4 supports it but that's unaffordable with my current budget. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif