Roxio Toast 7

All Macs are sold with a free copy of iLife, a suite of software developed by Apple that contains programs such as iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto for handling digital music, photography and video editing.

These programs include a variety of options for creating audio CDs and burning your videos onto DVD. However, Roxio's Toast provides a number of additional features for creating CDs and DVDs that go beyond the basic features found in iLife.

There are useful options for backing up files and data onto CD or DVD and creating discs that work with both Macs and PCs. However, our favourite new feature is the ability to create music DVDs.

Instead of putting home movies or other types of video onto a DVD disc, this feature allows you to store up to 50 hours worth of music on a single DVD using the same high-quality Dolby Digital format used by commercial DVD video titles.

Like DVD videos, these music DVDs can contain menus that organise your music collection into different categories and playlists, so it's easy to create a music DVD containing dozens of hours of music to suit different moods or occasions.

Toast includes a number of templates for creating menus, so you can quickly select as many songs as you want and then just drop them into a menu template.

There are also additional options, such as the ability to set the DVD to automatically start playing music as soon as you insert it into a DVD player, or to create a photo slideshow that plays along with the music.

And, to make things even easier, Toast 7 includes a new media browser feature that automatically locates all the music, photos and video clips that you have compiled in the various iLife programs.

All songs, photos and videos show up inside the media browser window, allowing for quickly locating and selecting the files needed for a particular CD or DVD project.

With this upgrade, Toast 7 confirms its position as one of our favourite Mac programs, and it is an ideal extension to the power and versatility of Apple's iLife suite.