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(More customer reviews)Roxio has made an enemy today.
Unless their e-mail tech support produces stellar results, their name is forever tarnished in my mind and I will never purchase their crap software again.
Okay, installed smoothly, has nice tutorials, looks pretty good. Doesn't work.
Before you claim pilot error: I am using the latest Mac OS on a new MacBook Pro with 4GB. I was running no other apps at the time. I used the built-in OEM DVD drive. I used new, clean media. I installed updates to Toast. I did everything correctly.
First project was to burn some sample files taken with a FLIP camera onto a DVD. That actually went smoothly. It was about a 1:1 conversion time. My minor complaint are that the media browser is kind of slow and clunky and is not good when you have hundreds of files, and doesn't support drag-and-drop (although it supports the "finder's" drag and drop. Oddly inconsistent.) It's much more convenient to simply drag-and-drop your video files from Lightroom 3, or perhaps the finder, than to use their browser.
I've never fully understood the full concept of this software since so many of the things (like making audio or data discs) you can do natively in the Mac desktop or from inside of iTunes. The ONLY REASON I wanted this software was to burn HIGH-DEF files onto a standard DVD. (Yes, I know it will hold much less than a Blu-Ray disk would - that's not the issue.)
Then things got bad...
FIRST - in microscopic type you'll find that this particular feature, which is highly touted on the packaging, isn't included!!! That's like buying Macaroni and Cheese and finding out the cheese is sold separately. Idiots. You have to pay another $20 to download the HD plug-in! And then these rip-off artists, straight out of sleazy used car dealer school, try to sell you a backup disk for a whopping $17 extra, AND THEN, they try to sell you undercoating, er, I mean, a $6 insurance policy. Apparently if you lose your computer or have to otherwise re-download the software THAT YOUR PAID FOR, they won't let you unless you coughed up the six buck insurance up front. WHAT A SCAM!!! If you fall for it, you end up paying an extra $43 on top of what you already paid, to get a feature that is supposed to be part of the package!
Then things got REALLY bad...
Okay, so I went to burn 10 minutes of high-def Flip video. It chugged away for OVER AN HOUR and then LOCKED UP at the 99% mark. For kicks, I tried it again, with 1 minute of some different video. Again it LOCKED UP at 99%. IT LOCKED UP BAD. I couldn't eject the disk - I couldn't exit the program ("Abort" was active, but it too locks up). You have to use Activity Monitor to force quit the app. EVEN AFTER A RESTART I couldn't eject the disk! DISK UTILITY wouldn't even eject the disk! I did a hard-power restart, and the Mac wouldn't boot - you could hear it trying to make sense of this bad disc, but never got past the blue screen. I've never seen such behavior in a Mac. Finally, on the SECOND HARD POWER CYCLE, the Mac said "enough of this s***!" and kicked the disk out and proceeded to boot fine again.
If you look on Roxio's own user forum, YOU'LL SEE THAT THIS IS A COMMON PROBLEM, YET THEY CONTINUE TO SELL BAD SOFTWARE, and they continue to rip you off for the plug-in that doesn't work either. This software has a lot of other features, most of which I don't care about, and based on this experience, I doubt I'll take the time and suffer the frustration of trying them, so you're on your own there.
As a software engineer myself, it's hard to say this, this company need to fail, or reorganize or something. Every engineer responsible for shipping this P.O.S. code should be booted out of the industry. If you worked on this project, don't even dream of submitting a resume to my company. Go to work tomorrow and punch your boss in the nose for limiting your future opportunities.
I spent hours of my life composing this review so you won't have to suffer my frustration.
Please click that this review was helpful, so these jokers get the message that they can't sell non-functioning products.
FOLLOW-UP:
I was impressed that Customer Service got back to me in less than a day - however the advice was pretty generic and useless - especially since I had already explained that I had done the basic things on their list already (update drivers, clean media, lower write speed, etc). I tried a couple of additional seemingly useless suggestions to no avail. It still hangs at 99% after running all night. HOWEVER - I did find that it made a semi-usable high definition disk on a standard DVD afterall! The disc wasn't recognized by my PS3, but to my amazement, after a full minute of examining the disc, my Samsung Blu-ray player indeed brought up the disc menu and played the content back in high definition.... so the product HALF WORKS, as long as you don't mind having to FORCE QUIT the app after each burn and REBOOTING your Mac in order to eject the disc. I'm not sure if the PS3 issue is Roxio's fault or Sony's. Anyone else have luck burning HD files to DVD and playing them on PS3 using Toast? IF ROXIO WOULD FIX THIS %$@# HANG, they'd probably earn 4 stars, but as it is now, I'm only going to bother with this nonsense for a couple of important discs and then probably never bother with it again until they fix it. According to the process dump: it looks like it's stuck waiting for a signal or semaphore release from the hardware, but why would this be any different when burning HD-formatted files over SD-formatted files? Some engineer at Sonic needs to investigate this.
Another lame finding, and I'm not sure this Roxio/Sonic's limitation or the Blu-ray standard, but it limits you to 98 video files on a disc. That might sound like a lot, especially considering you only get about 30 minutes of video or less on a standard DVD, but as most home movies (such as done with the Flip) are made up of dozens of 3-10 second clips, I had only filled up half the DVD before Toast complained that I couldn't add any more files.
Yet another lame finding: and again, I don't know if this is their fault, or the DVD standard - but as Toast burns all these clips as individual movies (rather than chapters) you can't skip any scenes by pressing the CHAPTER+ keys! And you know how boring some home video can be! I hope future editions (if they're still in business) can support generating these files as chapters.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Toast 11 Titanium Mac
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