Toast 7 to include FLAC support

[ffooky]

Here's a link and dig the screenshots gallery at the bottom of the page.

Toast has always relied on QuickTime in the past so this might have pleasant consequences for OS X.

[U2Lynne]

Very cool!

I'm not that impressed byt the DivX stuff, but I guess some people must find that important.

[AAR.oner]

werd!

[gsmyth79]

That looks great!

The menu authoring looks pretty cool as well. I hate iMovie and iDVD.

[ffooky]

It will indeed burn audio from FLAC and now has the facility to export (convert) audio formats. The Getting Started Guide bundled with it states:

"OGG: Creates a high quality compressed audio file, similar to MP3. Your player will need Ogg Vorbis support. iTunes does not support Ogg Vorbis.

FLAC: Creates a full quality compressed audio file. Your player will need FLAC support. iTunes does not support FLAC."

I couldn't give a monkey's about Vorbis but the fact that it does not support ALAC (licensing maybe?) but makes a point of mentioning the lack of iTunes support for FLAC is a nice nudge in Apple's direction.

[ffooky]

Forgot to add that it will now automatically create an empty AUDIO_TS folder if you create a DVD-ROM with a VIDEO_TS folder using the Data tab.

[ffooky]

Bummer. If you burn straight from FLAC to audio disc, Toast rather wonderfully inserts a 1/10th of a second gaps between tracks. Unforgiveably crappy IMO.

[U2Lynne]

*grumble* *grumble*

[ffooky]

Well, things turned out to be even worse. On further investigation it's apparent that some actual data is lost at track transitions, not just silence added.

If that wasn't enough the whole FLAC implementation is totally buggered. If you convert anything to or from FLAC with Toast 7, the resultant files contain differing audio data from the original. If you go WAV1->FLAC->WAV2, the two waves are not identical.

Absolute dog's breakfast.

I made a detailed report of the various bugs on Roxio's Toast 7 discussion forum and I've just had this reply:

"The development team is investigating this."

Here come the Roxio Men In Black.

[U2Lynne]

You would think that if they bothered to implement it (the flac support) that they would have a clear grasp on the concept of 'lossless audio'. Not testing this out before release is just not cool. Not cool at all!

Bad Roxio!

[ffooky]

It's reminiscent of the debacle with the initial Windows version of Apple Lossless that, er, wasn't.

Still, it's not due for general release for a week or two so with any luck they'll sort it before then but what a joke.