Restore data discs
There is a welcome new feature for recovering your precious photos, music, and files when CDs get scratched or damaged, making the data unreadable. Choose Copy > Disc Copy and select Use Disc Recovery in the Disc Options area. Insert the damaged disc and select Record. Toast begins copying the disc, and when it can't read a damaged area, it retries several times before bypassing the damaged area. This can take a long time depending on the damage and the file sizes.

In the box are a Mac Only disc set and a PC disc set. Each contains a small software application called Roxio Restore, which allows you to easily restore an individual file or folder, or an entire disc set. The Mac version of Roxio Restore runs on Mac OS X v 10.3 or higher. To run it the Mac does not have to have Toast 8 installed.

Span files
You can span files of any size across multiple discs. I inadvertently discovered this welcome feature when I tried to burn a CD bigger than the capacity of one CD. Toast let me know that it would burn the files on two CDs. It partitioned everything automatically and made the pair readable either on both Mac and PC.

Support for LightScribe-enabled burners
I have the LaCie d2 DVD+-RW with LightScribe (direct disc labeling) external burner. I had to update the Firmware and the LightScribe labeler software to be compatible with Toast. Toast 8 includes Disc Cover RE, a disc labeling software compatible with LightScribe-enabled drives and media. Getting it all to work was not intuitive, and I had to go to the Help menu for the steps. Once the CD label was designed, Toast etched a beautiful disc label using the LaCie external drive. Disc Cover RE in Toast is better and easier to use than LaCie's LightScribe Labeler to create disc labels and case covers for printing or laser-etching to Lacie's LightScribe-enabled external disc burner. Its templates had a wider variety of designs and applicability. It has a myriad of paper choices, and lets you chose printers that print labels directly on the CD/DVD.

Complement to iLife
The Toast Media Browser provides direct access to Mac photos, music, and videos, including shows recorded with EyeTV tuners. It also works beautifully with Spotlight. However, there is a bug in which you cannot view the current iPhoto Library. I have many iPhoto Libraries in my Home>Pictures folder. When I choose a Library to work with, Toast 8 defaults to a photo library other than the one I chose. Renaming the Library folder to plain iPhoto Library did not solve the problem. Toast 8 chooses a Library and nothing I do can change it. When I tinkered with the names of the iPhoto Libraries, I had two named "iPhoto Library" which is strange, as iPhoto usually gives an error message that the name is already used. Now the Toast browser does not display any photos.

On my MacBook Pro, it did default to the iPhoto Library, but did not see the one entitled 'iPhoto Library Calendars' which is the one I selected.

I spoke with Roxio's Adam Fingerman, Director of Product Management for Mac, to ask about this problem. He said that it is not possible to access many iPhoto Libraries within Toast. The workaround is to drag photos from iPhoto to Toast. He also suggested making an alias of the desired iPhoto Library and placing it in the Pictures folder. Toast looks for aliases.

Blu-ray support
Toast 8 includes support for Blu-ray Disc burners, enhanced audio CD burning with features from Jam, media conversion from Popcorn, slick photo discs and disc cataloging software, so you can find files on your CD/DVD archives without the need to have them in your computer.

I couldn't test the Blu-ray disc support as I don't own a Blu-ray disc player or recorder. Fingerman also mentioned that the BD (Blu-ray disc) acts like an external drive to which you can click and drag files till you fill the 50 GB capacity.

What's in the box?
The Roxio Toast 8 box contains sufficient information to know whether or not you want to buy this update. You don't have to wait to read the well-written 128-page manual, which does not overwhelm.

May I dream?
I was disappointed that this app does not see my Aperture Library. While they don't promise this feature, it would be GREAT if it did. It is a needed function, since Aperture does not have a friendly way to burn CDs or DVDs. Right now to burn a DVD of photos from Aperture one must export them to a folder on the desktop and then use Toast to burn a DVD.

My other letdown was the inability to burn DVD multiple sessions. BurnAgain DVD ($24.50) has this capability. Fingerman is committed to making a reliable product and doesn't feel this feature is ready yet