Roxio Toast Titanium has long been the de facto standard when it comes to burning DVDs and CDs on a Mac. It's packed with features which allow you not only to record disks but also perform backups, edit video and audio and manage your TiVo recorded TV shows.

Once up and running, you'll notice that version 9 sports an improved, clearer user interface. The side panel contains all the simplest functions for choosing which type of disk you want to burn, including Data, music, VCD, DivX, Video_TS, or just plain DVD... the program now also supports Blu-Ray Disks. Simply select the disk type, drag and drop the files you want on the disk and hit the big red button! If you want to create your own DVD with menus and other features, Toast titanium has several templates to help you along, or you can create your own custom menus. The new Batch DVD-Video function is great to quickly compress or convert videos to DVD.

In terms of new features, the most significant addition to Toast Titanium 9 is support for TiVo and EyeTV, two types of Personal Video Recorder which have gained huge popularity in North America over recent years. Toast can now automatically connect to your TiVo and copy shows and movies across to your Mac, ready to watch there, convert for a portable device or burn to disk. Your EyeTV shows can be streamed from the internet to your Mac or iPhone. Toast Titanium also adds some limited yet welcome editing features, in this case, trimming and cropping to clean up your videos.

If creating audio CDs is your thing than you'll like the fingerprinting technology which helps you identify tracks with no name.

Another interesting feature of Toast Titanium 9 is Data Recovery, a new tool which tries to rescue data from a damaged (i.e. scratched) optical disk. Though not 100% effective, the program works hard to rescue as much data as possible, meaning that data which was previously lost for good can now potentially be rescued.

As usual, Toast Titanium has some slight problems concerning inter-compatibility with older versions and with software from other manufacturers. While we didn't find these particularly vexing, it should be noted that some users have complained about opening Toast 7 data projects.

In all, Toast Titanium 9 is a complete utility for working with optical disk formats, whether you're burning, recovering or backing-up data. With the addition of TiVo support, Toast Titanium really is becoming an essential application for any Mac.