Alternative to Toast?

[zen]

I've got Toast Titanium running on an 800MHz iBook G4, with internal combo drive and one of the new LaCie external double-layer DVD writers. I've been running Toast in Panther and have now upgraded to Tiger, and Toast is behaving in exactly the same way.

It freezes, tells me it can't unmount discs to copy them, tells me there are disc errors, tells me media is unrecognisable, tells me the drive tray is open, etc etc. Whenever I use Toast, there is a 50/50 chance it will present me with some bizzare error. Most of the time I can just click ok or cancel and it will actually keep doing what I told it - for example, I click the red button to copy a CD > iBook freezes for 30 seconds > Toast reports a lengthy error code and says the disc can't be burnt > I press OK and it starts copying it anyway.

As I said, Toast Titanium did this in Panther and after an erase and install for Tiger it is doing exactly the same things. I've upgraded Toast to 6.0.9 (I think that is the lastest version). I had Toast before I got the LaCie DVD burner, and it did all the same stuff. The LaCie drive came with a full install of Toast so I ditched the install I already had and reinstalled it - same problem.

So is it just me, or is Toast as buggy as hell? And is there another good alternative (apart from the Finder or Disc Utility, which are both pretty slow) to Toast? I find it hard to believe there is just one disc authoring app for Mac OS?

Zen

 

[Blue Velvet]

I've always found Toast to be one of the most stable apps I've used on loads of different installations incl. back in OS 8.5 days.

How much RAM are you running in that iBook? Have you had a play with the RAM & disk cache settings?

I also never try to burn my disks at too high a speed. Have you tried different media?

 

[rainman::|:|]

This may be a stupid question, but help me understand.

Do these Toast crashes happen when burning a CD in the combo drive? Or just burning a CD/DVD in the external? If you don't do it regularly, test it out by burning a CD on the combo with Toast. That will give a good indication of whether it's a hardware or software issue.

edit: sorry, just saw that you already answered this. Quite unusual, Toast is very stable for me as well. Even on a system with almost no RAM. Does (um, what company makes Toast now? Roxio? is it a dead product?) anyone provide support for Toast anymore?

 

[zen]

640MB RAM, 30GB HDD with somewhere between 5 and 12 GB free. Are the RAM and disk cache settings in the Toast preferences? I'll take a look - what should they be set to, ideally?

I tend to leave the burn speed to maximum, but I'll experiment with turning it down.

To answer the other questions: the problems happen with both the internal combo drive and the external LaCie DVD writer. For example, this morning I was trying to copy a DVD I had burnt in DVD Studio Pro. I put the DVD into the combo drive, and a blank into the LaCie drive. Both appeared as normal on the desktop. Toast reported a DVD in the combo drive and a blank DVD-R in the LaCie drive. When I clicked copy, Toast froze for about 30 seconds and then said it couldn't unmount the volume for copying. The icon of the DVD-R did disappear from the desktop, like it had been unmounted. I repeated this for about an hour, trashed the prefs, restarted etc, and was about to give up when I simply clicked ok on the error message (DVD icon vanishes from desktop), then hit the burn button again. The DVD started copying, and I was sitting there going "WTF?"

Roxio still make toast, and it isn't dead! If I had the same problems in Panther and Tiger perhaps it is the RAM/disk cache settings?

Zen

I've always found Toast to be one of the most stable apps I've used on loads of different installations incl. back in OS 8.5 days.

How much RAM are you running in that iBook? Have you had a play with the RAM & disk cache settings?

I also never try to burn my disks at too high a speed. Have you tried different media?

 

[Blue Velvet]

I burn my Audio CDs @ 4x; data CDs @ 8x; DVDs @ 4-8x with Sony & Verbatim media. The only coaster I've had in the last six months was when the Mac kernal-panicked as I plugged my shuffle into the hub as I was burning & downloading at the same time...

Speed is never of the essence for me when burning disks and seeing as OSX multitasks so well, I just get on and do other things.

Toast 5 here at home. RAM cache set to 64mb. Toast 6 at work...

 

[zen]

Forgot to add, I use Mitsubishi and Imation media for CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-Rs and DVD-RWs.

Zen

 

[hodgjy]

I've got Toast Titanium running on an 800MHz iBook G4, with internal combo drive and one of the new LaCie external double-layer DVD writers. I've been running Toast in Panther and have now upgraded to Tiger, and Toast is behaving in exactly the same way.

It freezes, tells me it can't unmount discs to copy them, tells me there are disc errors, tells me media is unrecognisable, tells me the drive tray is open, etc etc. Whenever I use Toast, there is a 50/50 chance it will present me with some bizzare error. Most of the time I can just click ok or cancel and it will actually keep doing what I told it - for example, I click the red button to copy a CD > iBook freezes for 30 seconds > Toast reports a lengthy error code and says the disc can't be burnt > I press OK and it starts copying it anyway.

As I said, Toast Titanium did this in Panther and after an erase and install for Tiger it is doing exactly the same things. I've upgraded Toast to 6.0.9 (I think that is the lastest version). I had Toast before I got the LaCie DVD burner, and it did all the same stuff. The LaCie drive came with a full install of Toast so I ditched the install I already had and reinstalled it - same problem.

So is it just me, or is Toast as buggy as hell? And is there another good alternative (apart from the Finder or Disc Utility, which are both pretty slow) to Toast? I find it hard to believe there is just one disc authoring app for Mac OS?

Zen

It's not a Toast problem---Tiger broke Toast, and Roxio knows it. They said on their discussion forum we can expect an update "really soon." I have the same problem with Toast not unmounting the drive prior to counting. The workaround is to go into Disk Utility, unmount it yourself (don't eject), and then start Toast. Works fine then.

 

[Bear]

...
So is it just me, or is Toast as buggy as hell? And is there another good alternative (apart from the Finder or Disc Utility, which are both pretty slow) to Toast? I find it hard to believe there is just one disc authoring app for Mac OS?

Zen

I don't know how buggy Toast is, but have you tried the new Burning Folders that Tiger Finder has? I think you will find that they fix the speed issue you speak of.

[I do know that Roxio Easy CD Creator is buggy as hell. But that's Windows software.]