For many of us, Toast has become so indispensable that life without it is unimaginable. This may sound rather dramatic, but think about it... true isn't it? It's also hard to imagine how Roxio could improve on such a solid and reliable piece of software, but somehow the developers have made it even better.

For a start, in the Source and Settings window you'll find a new media browser feature that takes you directly to your creative centres - music, photo and movie libraries - from where you can easily drag the files you want to burn. This is just so much classier than bringing windows to and fro, and could usefully have been extended to a general browser for all types of files and folders.

Toast has never been that useful for archiving data. That changes now, with the introduction of Data Spanning. This new feature enables you to spread large folders and files across any number of discs. You can, for example, back-up your whole iTunes library in one go across a few DVDs, and each disc contains an index of content and location so you can find and re-load individual files or folders using the bundled Restore software, a copy of which is also saved to each disc.

It doesn't give you the progressive backup of Retrospect, for example, but using Déjà Vu, a program that comes with Toast 7, managing and organising backups becomes a whole lot easier.

There are a few other minor improvements to data handling. You've always been able to create Mac and PC compatible discs, but now you can simply and easily make hybrids with exclusive content for Mac and PC users. For that creative touch, you can customise the background and icons of your discs with colours or pictures from your photo collection.

Making music

You could create music DVDs in Toast 6, but they're being brought to prominence in version 7 - handy as many of us have home theatre systems to play them and music libraries big enough to fill a DVD. You can fit up to 50 hours of music on a single disc using Dolby Digital compression, which should be long enough for most parties, though the capacity reduces to seven hours if you want to maintain PCM quality and less than half that for 96kHz and 24- bit audio.