Roxio releases Toast 8 Titanium; exclusive official provider of TiVoToGo for the Mac

Roxio today launched Toast 8 Titanium, an upgrade to its Mac disc burning software. Continuing to enhance and extend the functionality of the Mac OS and iLife applications, Toast 8 offers a range of new innovative features and ground-breaking platform firsts that enable users to see, hear, copy, and enjoy their entire digital lives on a disc and on-the-go.

Toast 8 brings TiVo and the Mac together, enabling users to enjoy their favorite TV programs on their Mac, burn them to disc, or easily convert them for viewing on a mobile device such as an iPod. Complementing the features of iTunes, Toast 8 enables users to apply professional-quality tools to create superior sounding audio CD mixes and music DVDs. Going beyond the burning options included in Mac OS, Toast 8 introduces Blu-ray Disc burning, as well as automatic disc cataloging, cross-platform data spanning, and disc restoration.

Toast 8 Highlights:
• TV & Toast: Mac users can now enjoy their favorite TV shows on disc and on-the-go with Toast’s exclusive support for digital video recorders, including TiVo and EyeTV. This support allows users to watch recorded shows on their Mac, burn them to DVD or DivX discs, or convert them for enjoyment on a portable player such as an iPod or PSP.

• Photo Discs: Toast 8 now makes it easy to share favorite photos with friends and family with the new Toast Photo Disc feature. Toast Photo Discs store thousands of full-resolution pictures as well as an auto-run slideshow. Discs can be played on a Windows PC or a Mac, or used in photo-finishing kiosks.

• Personalized Labels and Covers: Toast provides new ways to personalize your discs with labels, cover art, and inserts. Featuring full drawing and text editing tools, as well as over 600 clip art images and Google image search. Toast also supports LightScribe drives and media to allow users to burn artwork and labels directly on discs.

• Superior Sounding Discs: For the best listening and playback experience, Toast 8 provides DJ-style crossfades, volume normalization tools, sound enhancing plug-ins, track trimming capabilities, and other features previously found in Roxio’s Jam™ software. In addition to great sounding audio CDs, users can create 50-hour music DVDs complete with on-screen menus, shuffle play, and Dolby Digital sound.

• Music Rediscovery: Toast 8 lets consumers rediscover their analog music collections with the new CD Spin Doctor Assistant. This assistant guides users every step of the way, from setting up the equipment all the way through burning a disc or converting tracks for enjoyment on portable devices.

• Disc Recovery: Consumers can recover data from scratched or damaged discs that may be unreadable in the Mac OS Finder. Now with Toast 8’s Disc Recovery tools, users can gracefully recover from read errors encountered during disc copying and recover some files from damaged discs to create new clean copies of the previously unreadable disc.

• Back-up and Convert DVDs: Users can backup an entire 9 GB DVD to a standard 4.7 GB DVD disc. Fit-to-DVD™ compression uses all available disc space to maximize video quality. Toast also features Director’s Cut custom compilations, so users can select the specific video, audio, and languages they wish to record or convert individual video files for use on a portable video player.

• Blu-ray Disc Recording: Only Toast brings Blu-ray Disc burning to the Mac platform, enabling users to store as many as 12,500 music tracks, 50,000 photos, or up to four hours of high-definition video on a single 50 GB Blu-ray Disc. Toast’s Dynamic Writing feature allows consumers to use a Blu-ray Disc recorder like a giant hard drive by dragging and dropping content directly onto the disc icon on the desktop to add or remove files.

• Disc Cataloging and Instant Search: Users can automatically catalog the contents of their discs so they can track the contents even when the disc is no longer in the drive. This works automatically with discs created in Toast, as well as with previously burned and commercial discs, such as audio CDs.

• Data Spanning: Breaking through the size limitations of other burning software, the Toast 8 data-spanning feature lets users safely back-up data of any size, such as entire music or photo libraries, iMovie projects, and DV files. The feature automatically splits files and folders across multiple discs, and maintains the exact folder and file structure for easy retrieval on any Mac OS X, Windows XP, or Windows Vista system. Data spanning is an ideal way for Mac users in homes, schools, or businesses to share large files with Mac and PC users in other locations.

Toast 8 Titanium is available now for purchase direct from Roxio (http://www.roxio.com) and will be widely available from e-tailers and retail outlets this month. The suggested price is $99.99. Owners of previous versions may be eligible for upgrade offers. Special pricing and unique discount bundles are available at Roxio’s Macworld Expo booth #314, or by visiting Roxio’s ‘virtual’ Macworld store (http://www.roxio.com/macworld) through January 14th.

Roxio is the exclusive official provider of TiVoToGo for the Mac—and Toast 8 Titanium is the way to get it and enjoy your favorite shows on the Mac, on DVD, and on-the-go.

To learn more about TiVoToGo for the Mac and Toast 8 Titanium: http://roxio.com/go/mactivotogo

Wired Blogs has Mac TivoToGo screenshots here.

 here.