Nowadays we can buy and download our music off the Net and play it instantly on our computers, completely bypassing the CD. However, almost every computer in the world has a CD-ROM drive that can also play audio CDs, and many new computers are shipping with CD-RW burners. Plus, blank CDs are under a dollar each. So, if you want to take your downloaded music to go, you can simply convert it from the downloaded MP3 file to an AIFF or WAV file, and burn that to an audio CD-format disc. Toast has been around for years and is the benchmark application for CD burning. It works with just about every CD-R and CD-RW burner from every manufacturer, including the new USB models, and it burns almost every format: audio CDs, Macintosh data CDs, PC data CDs, enhanced music and data CDs, hybrid CDs, video CDs, etc. Many users will use Toast 4 for archiving data, as an inexpensive means of delivering content to clients, or for burning short-run or prototype multimedia CD-ROMs. But a growing market for Toast is the music crowd, especially with the explosion of MP3 music on the Web. Adaptec's Toast 4 Deluxe is CD creation and burning software for a new generation, but not without some features for the legacy crowd that worships vinyl.
Version 4 now makes it easier than ever to burn music CDs by importing (without conversion) MP3 files directly and converting them on the fly as it writes them to a CD. Now you can mix and match your favorite tunes and burn your own "best of" audio mix. Toast also includes features for extracting music tracks from commercially available audio CDs, allowing you to duplicate (for your own purposes) any CD that you own, or mix and match tracks from your favorite CDs.
As if that weren't enough, Version 4 includes the necessary cabling (a stereo connector with a pair of RCA plugs on one end and a ministereo jack on the other) for connecting the microphone jack on your computer to the output jacks on your stereo, and the software to facilitate converting from an analog source like vinyl LPs directly to audio CDs. The software, called Spin Doctor, has features for controlling input levels, balancing, cleaning up the audio by using certain filters, and viewing the waveform of the audio for keeping an eye on levels. For anyone who needs to create any type of CD, Toast rocks. --Mike Caputo
