I wasn't going to buy this new version of Toast. I've had every version since 4, and I didn't see any reason to buy this version. I eventually bought it to be able to encode DivX movies, since Tiger broke DivX 5. I was waiting for the DivX site to offer the upgrade, but apparently Toast has an early exclusive on it. Anyway I'm happy to say that I'm glad that I spent the money.

Toast 7 allows you to BATCH ENCODE videos (something that should be stamped on the box). Since compressing video takes a buttload of time on my 1GhZ (dual processor) G4, this one feature is worth $100 (kind of). Compressing a 22 minute clip takes over 2 hours on my computer. Now I can drag six clips into Toast, go to work, and come home to find all the clips compressed. It's an excellent feature that I don't think you'll get when DivX releases the Quicktime Plugin.

I like the way Toast 7 makes DVDs; I like it better than iDVD. Toast 7 can do three things that make it better than iDVD. First off - 2 and a half hour long DVDs (iDVD is still at two hours), and the picture quality is excellent. Secondly - the DVDs can you create play all the way through; there is no "play all" feature in iDVD. Thirdly, you can add automatic chapters in each title; you can set chapters every 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 minutes. iDVD has Toast beat when it comes to motion menus - iDVD is more configurable, you can make prettier menus, add music, dynamic drop zones etc. If you just want to make a DVD to watch (who really cares about menus anyway) Toast is great.

Toast has a bunch of audio features that I don't care about (Spin Doctor is crap, buy Peak LE instead) but it allows you to make exact copies of your audio CDs -something that OS X won't let you do. This is nothing new to Toast, but I figure that I'll include it in my review. If you make mix CDs with iTunes, and hate the little gap that appears between contiguous songs, then buy Toast. Toast will allow you to make disc images of audio CDs, mount them (I had 6 mounted), and then drag the songs you want into the window. I did this with two live albums by two different bands; the transitions between the two different albums were more seamless than iTunes can do with contiguous tracks from one album.

Finally, Toast includes "Motion Pictures" for photo slideshows. Ho-Hum. They included iView with Toast 5, which was so good that I upgrade to the "fuller" version.

I recommend Toast 7 highly. I know that $100 is a lot of dough ($80 after rebate) for a program, but it's worth it if you work with video. If iLife wasn't $100 (and it wouldn't be if Apple didn't charge $3000 for it's computers) the sticker shock wouldn't be so great.