by , 8:30 AM EDT, July 30th, 2004

Roxio, Inc. has updated Toast 6 with support for high-capacity, double-layered DVD drives. The 17.4 megabyte update to version 6.0.7 is available now.

With the update, customers can now use a growing number of third-party DVD burners that create high-capacity, 8GB DVDs that store the equivelant of 72 hours of music or three hours of video. It is also possible to copy unencrypted DVDs and disk images without re-compressing to fit on a single-layer DVD.

This update supports a lot more double-layer drives," Adam Fingerman, Director of Product Management at Roxio told The Mac Observer in an exclusive interview. "Among them are a variety of NEC drives, LG, Sony, TEAC. We have qualified and verified six of the double-layered drives."

Mr. Fingerman said the list is growing but that finding actual double-layered drives on the market to test has been a challenge.

"They are really hard to come by," he said. "We're find that getting production versions of the drives is hard and getting the blank media is even harder. It's like plastic gold."

Mr. Fingerman said the turn around to add double-layered support happened fairly quickly, being that the industry specifications for the new layering wasn't finalized until the end of June.

One new feature of the update is MIDI Karaoke support. The Karaoke files are music files with synthesized instruments and synchronized text lyrics. "If you do a search on the Internet for .kar files, you'll find thousands, many for free," Mr. Fingerman said. "You can use them in CD and DVD projects and now create them with Toast 6.0.7."

Mr. Fingerman also confirmed other new features including an option to automatically create additional playlist buttons to the main disc menu when more than 99 tracks are added to a DVD music album, and a list view option in the edit sheet for photo slideshows and DVD music album playlists.

Version 6.0.7 will update any prior version of Toast 6 Titanium to version 6.0.7, but will not update any version of Toast 5 Titanium, or Toast 6 Lite.