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it's a strange time to be Toast. It's not that it isn't still a great product-A is. But its latest version, Toast 4 Deluxe, though a fine successor to and measurable improvement on its forbears, has been born into troubled times. In a sense, Adaptec's Toast has lived a charmed life to date. Mac CD-R has never been the roller-coaster ride that CD recording on the PC has been-it basically worked all along. And Toast deserves a lot of credit for that. Even in CD-R's mid-290s adolescence, when it had competition-Incat, Corel, Gear, and OMI vying for pieces of the Mac sliver of a very small pie-- Toast [then an Astarte product) was always the most deserving and the best fed.
Even when the software was on the shoddy side (besides Astarte, only OMI really put much effort into its Mac product), the Macintosh made them all look good. The Mac only gave you one way to record, and it succeeded remarkably well. And soon enough, all those other contenders were gone, and Toast-the best of the bunch-survived. Moreover, SCSI CID-Recordable drives were arguably the first to mature into anything like the welloiled machines you see today, and they were the only type of drive that you could connect to a Mac. Best of all, the rigidity of the Mac system saved users from all the fancy footwork PC recordists had to master to shore up their systems (building partitions, switching off background operations, adjusting memory options). Amazingly, with all the advances in PC CD recording technology-- from packet writing to wizards-and exponential growth in hard disk size and processor power that should have obviated the need for this kind of damage control, Dana Parker's three-year-old article, "The Seven Rules of Safe CD-R," continues to get our readers out of jams, as the halfdozen letters I get each year singing its praises attest.
With all these factors in its favor (and only one current cor petitor, Charismac's Discribe, which is only sold in bundles), Adaptec's biggest concern for its Toast line has likely been that the Macintosh platform teetered on the edge of extinction throughout CD-R's greatest period of growth. The arrival of Apple's surprisingly popular iMac, G3, and G4 should have the Toast team...