EXCLUSIVES

By David Hutchison

You have just completed work on your first DVD video epic, complete with interactive titles, promotional stills, and a separate CD-Audio soundtrack album. All that remains is the critical step of moving the movie and soundtrack from your internal hard drive to the DVD-R and CD-Audio media that will enable the world to enjoy your masterpiece.

Up steps Roxio's Toast with Jam 5.0 software. Built for Mac OSX and OS9, the Roxio software provides a suite of tools for preparing, burning, and backing up media assets onto CD and DVD. You could use the free tools which come with Apple's iTunes and iDVD, but the Roxio offering provides more flexibility and features.

Toast with Jam 5.0 ($189.95) consists of Roxio's flagship Toast 5 Titanium CD and DVD burning software (see our review in the Summer, 2002 issue) plus the Jam 5 pro-audio CD mastering tool. Also included are a number of third-party tools such as Peak LE VST, for processing audio, iView Media, for managing media assets, and Magic Mouse Discus, for creating CD artwork.

More Jam Please

Toast is to baking as Jam is to adding ingredients to recipes in their proper proportion. Tortured metaphors aside, Jam assists musicians in preparing their CD project's final master prior to burning in Toast. In performing nondestructive editing operations on CD audio tracks, Jam users can independently fine-tune the gain of each channel in a track, add crossfades between tracks, trim audio, insert pauses, index points, and generate disc image files that are sent on to Toast for burning.

Extreme Networking

Sent on to Toast? That's right. Instead of handling disc burning internally, Jam now relies on the Toast engine for burning CDs. (Users with just enough memory to run either Jam or Toast, but not both, will likely wish to upgrade their RAM.) And Jam 5 enhances its tool set with other new features. As with Toast, Jam has been ported to OSX and both the OSX and OS9 versions of Jam sport snappy new interfaces which are attractive to look at and easy to work with.

Also new is support for 24-bit audio which used in combination with the new dithering feature allows for the smooth downsampling of high quality audio into the 16-bit format supported by the CD-Audio Red Book standard. For those remix and dance producers intent on adding innumerable crossfades between tracks, Jam 5 introduces a new graphical waveform editor which visually reinforces crossfade settings.

Jam imports a wide variety of audio formats including Sound Designer II split and stereo files, as well as AIFF, MP3, WAV, and QuickTime compatible files. The software ships with a 100+ page User's Guide which includes a helpful glossary of terms. On-line help for Jam 5 is also on board.

Real World Use

We tested the OSX version of Jam 5. As good as the new look of Jam is, there are a few annoying (albeit minor) interface inconveniences we'd like to see fixed. For example, users should be able to scroll the playback position of audio (and other time values) using the mouse. As it stands now, users must click on the current time and edit it using the cursor and number keys. As well, buttons in the Index Points window should be disabled when they are not available. (Clicking on them when they are not available displays an error dialog.)

On the plus side, individual columns in the track list can be easily edited in-line, doing away with the need for dialog boxes. When you click on a track's gain parameter for example, a slider pops up allowing you to quickly set a new value. As well, you can import multiple audio files into Jam by dragging them from the Finder or selecting them via an Import dialog.

Beyond CD Audio

Toast has traditionally been marketed as a CD-Audio burning tool, but recent releases have seen the Toast toolset expanded to include support for DVD-R burning, data archiving, and video.

Those without DVD-R drives can benefit from Toast's support for alternative CD formats. In addition to creating CD-Audio discs, Toast can also convert iMovie files and other digital video streams into Mac and Windows compatible Video-CD discs, a welcome option given the high per unit cost of DVD discs. For those with large music libraries, Toast can create MP3 CDs, each of which holds hours of music in contrast to the 80 minute maximum of the CD-Audio format.

All of this makes Toast an attractive all-in-one solution for burning almost any type of CD or DVD supported format - with one notable exception. We'd like to see Roxio enhance both Jam and Toast to support surround sound audio and the DVD-Audio format. Currently, there are no professional tools available on the Mac (and indeed, few on Windows) for creating DVD-Audio discs. Roxio is perfectly positioned to help this fledgling format get out of the starting gate and establish the Mac as the preferred platform of choice for DVD-Audio production.

Pros: Attractive interfaces for Toast and Jam; Toast supports a wide variety of disc burning formats; Jam supports the graphical editing of crossfades; Jam's 24-bit audio support Cons: Both Toast and Jam lack DVD-Audio and surround sound support System Requirements: Mac OS 9.1 or later or Mac OS X (10.1.2) or later, 128 Mb RAM; Price: $189.95 www.roxio.com