[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

In my continuing quest for Mac compatible devices, I happend upon a great deal on Sony CRX1611 Spressa 16x10x40 CD-RW drives for $75 from a resaler here in southern Cali. (I bought 5 of them) The drives are so new, they were stamped manufactured on July 18th, 2001. The case fronts are a nice dark shade of blue that looks great in the Firewire enclosures I get. I suspect they were manufactured for LaCie, as they are the exact same shade of blue as many of their product cases are.

Anyway, I figured that Sony drives will work with a Mac no matter what, I can sell these for a nice profit each, to a client who asked me to find 16x external burners for him, so what the heck. It's a one time as-is thing, no software- but I got them.

I get home, put one of the drives in a Firewire enclosure... it mounts a CD on the desktop, plays digital audio just fine, but of course, NO burn software will recognize it! I tried Toast 3x, 4/Deluxe and 5 Titanium..no dice. Disk Burner.. forget about it. CD Master, nada. Discribe won't even recognize these things! I check the Apple system profiler, nothing is showing up on my Firewire chain! I checked Sony's site and other sites... nothing. The drive is so new, it's barely mentioned anywhere. No firmware updates yet. No FAQs of any value, nada. I figured well, I've finally found something that should, but won't work on the Mac, at least for now.

So I hook it up to my PC, expecting it to at least work there.. and thinking I can at least sell these as PC only burners to someone else... but lo and behold, NOTHING on the PC I've yet found will recognize the drives! Not even the very latest update of EasyCD Creator. Nero, NTC, Disc Juggler, abCD, CDRWin, Discribe.. nothing.

I was ready to give up and consider that I've got 5 duds on my hands, until someone starts updating their software to include this drive. I can't very well unload a drive that no burn software recognizes. And on top of it, I've now got to find 5 more Mac compatible 16CDRWs at a good price for my client. Almost as an after thought, I remember there's an update to Toast Titanium, version 5.0.1, so I get it, but see that nowhere is this drive model listed as supported. But I try it anyway...

SUCCESS! The drives work beautifully with Titanium 5.0.1! What an awesome peice of software! The latest version of Easy CD won't touch the thing, but the latest Toast actually works and works beautifully! And it saved my ass, litterally!

The Mac and Mac software truly RULES!

[yoyo52]

Agreed. I used to have Discribe, but dumped it as soon as Toast 5.01 came out. It's a great app.

[-Q-]

Just picked up Toast Titanium after happily using Toast 3.5 for the past year and a half. It was definitely worth the price of admission. Thanks to it's EASY VCD feature, it will be cake to send everyone a video of our wedding this fall.

Great, great, product...

[zuggly]

A few questions about Toast Titanium..

1. What is the difference between a video cd and a dvd?

2. Considering I caputured the video from a VCR, could I
make a VHS home video into a "video cd" with Toast?

3. How long (min) can a video cd be?

[-Q-]

1. What is the difference between a video cd and a dvd?

Different compression and file formats. DVDs can hold much more data (GB vs. MB). DVD images are generally of better quality than VCDs. A VCD is usually equivalent to a VHS tape in terms of image quality. Roxio has a nice summary of it.

2. Considering I caputured the video from a VCR, could I
make a VHS home video into a "video cd" with Toast?

Yup. Toast comes with instructions on how to do this. There's also a discussion of VCDs on the Toast Website.

3. How long (min) can a video cd be?

Depends on the size and quality of the video. Most feature-length movies take up 2 CDs, so about an hour of good quality video can fit onto a CD.