Is Roxio Toast necessary? (And a Bento recommend)

[Morod]

Hi everyone,
I'm a recent Mac convert, and haven't used any of the bundled software that comes with an iMac yet. I want to make CD copies of some of my iTunes songs and make some DVD's of still photos I have in iPhoto. Nothing very fancy, really. Can I use whatever is on the iMac (I'm unsure what that would even be but assume it's on there someplace)? Is Toast necessary, or is it mainly for more elaborate productions? I have heard that MtR is user-unfriendly (3rd hand info), so that's probably not an option.
Any help for a noob would be great. I did a search on this subject and nothing came up.
On a totally unrelated note, I got the Bento db program and love it! Would recommend. Thanks!
Morod

 

[TEG]

OSX has disc burning built-it. Just insert your blank disc and it appears on the desktop, you can drag anything to it. Also, iTunes has built in CD-Audio burining.

Toast is more for duplicating discs, dealing with TiVo files, and creating DVD-Video Discs sourced from video files (as it does the coverting).

TEG

 

[jcsscia]

OSX has disc burning built-it. Just insert your blank disc and it appears on the desktop, you can drag anything to it. Also, iTunes has built in CD-Audio burining.

Toast is more for duplicating discs, dealing with TiVo files, and creating DVD-Video Discs sourced from video files (as it does the coverting).

TEG

One advantage of Toast or Toast Lite is that it will allow you to burn Sessions on a disk so you can fill it up. The BURN on the Mac OSX disk will not allow Session burns, it just burns disks with no chance to add others burns to fill up disk. I think I did see once you could do some roundabout way, but never used it to burn Sessions.