Toast is a CD and DVD authoring and media conversion software for Mac OS X, and it's not only one of the many out there, but the most popular disc authoring application on the Macintosh platform. Its history is a tumultuous one, since Toast was originally developed by Dr. Markus Fest and his company Miles Software GmbH and distributed by Astarte, but in 1997 the product was purchased by Adaptec, which later transferred it to Roxio.

Toast 8 Titanium was released today, and I must say that it seems a good choice to release the 8th version of a program on the 8th day of the month. Obviously, you will be able to see this program at work if you go to Macworld and visit Roxio's booth, but we'll talk about this a bit later. Now, I have to tell you about the new features that come with this release. Are you ready?

Let's see... according to Roxio, Toast 8 comes with "a number of unique new features and enhancements that help redefine the standard for disc burning on the Mac platform". Now, you can burn TV programs from TiVO and EyeTV to disc, as well as converting TV shows for viewing on Apple's video iPod or Sony's PSP. A feature that is becoming a standard these days, support for burning Blu-Ray discs has been added, and additional features include automatic disc cataloging, restoration and cross-platform data spanning. LightScribe technology is also supported, and Google image search functionality has been incorporated.

The list price of the program is 99.99$, but you can get it for 79.99$, after a 20$ mail-in rebate. To qualify for this offer, you must be the owner of one of the following products: Toast, Jam, Toast with Jam, Easy CD Creator or Easy CD & DVD Creator.

As I was saying earlier, you can check the company's booth at Macworld for further details, as well as its virtual Macworld store through January 14th. Just remember - booth #314, starting tomorrow!