Making mp3 cd's and dvd-audio...PLEASE HELP!!!

As you've seen, Toast does not encode MP3. The files must be MP3s before dragging to Toast. You need to do this conversion in iTunes. (Note: you cannot convert an iTunes Music Store download to mp3). As far as keeping track of which ones are AAC and which are MP3, scroll the main window all the way to the right. You'll see a heading titled "Kind." Click on that and your MP3 tracks will be sorted apart from the others.

I hope you are using Toast 7's Media browser to add your iTunes music to the Toast Audio window.

As for Toast's Music DVD, it is not the same as DVD-Audio. DVD-Audio requires a specially enabled DVD player whereas the Toast Music DVD will play on any video DVD player. It's very nice but I think it would be less useful if you couldn't see its menu.

You are correct that it takes a long time to convert your audio files to the Dolby Digital AC-3 format used on the Toast Music DVD. It takes less time if you choose uncompressed PCM audio instead of AC-3, but then you'll only fit about 7 hours of music to a DVD instead of 35-50 hours of AC-3 audio.

As for the errors making the music DVD, I've experienced problems when there is a flaw in the source music file. Sometimes Toast will simply stall trying to get past those errors. Apparently you got all the way to the burning stage where you encountered a buffer underrun error. Make sure you've updated to Toast 7.0.1. Also be sure that buffer underrun prevention is turned on in the Advanced tab of the Recorder Settings menu. Also, use good quality media. You can check the quality of your media by inserting a blank disc and choosing Disc Info from the Toast Recorder menu. In the window that appears you should see a hot link that takes you to the DVD media user reports for that media at videohelp.com.

I'd like to know more about what formats your car surround player supports. You've mentioned MP3 and DVD-Audio. Is there anything else (other than an audio CD of course)? Does the manual for the player describe any specifications for the discs it can read?

As for AAC and MP3. AAC should have slightly better sound quality but you might not be able the hear the difference (certainly not in a moving car). If sound quality is really important, then I'd convert first to Apple Lossless and then convert from that to MP3. This will reduce the quality loss from directly converting from one compressed format to another.

The Toast Media Browser is accessed by clicking the Media button near the top left of the Toast window. After clicking that button, click the top button so it says iTunes. You'll now see your iTunes playlists in the window below. This makes it real easy to browse through the list and drag tracks to the Toast Audio window.

When Toast creates Music DVDs and video DVDs it can encode the audio either as uncompressed PCM or compressed AC-3 (which is also called Dolby Digital). The default is a highly compressed AC-3. You can change this by clicking the More button (you'll see it near the bottom of the left-side window when the Formats button is selected at the top of the window). After clicking More, click Encoder and Custom. The audio settings are at the bottom.

PCM is very much like the AIFF format on audio CDs. It is very high quality. AC-3 is very much like MP3 or AAC because it is highly compressed. For a music DVD I suggest changing Toast's default AC-3 data rate from 192 kbps to 384 kbps assuming you have room on the DVD. This will get you higher quality sound (but not as high as PCM).

Both PCM and AC-3 are 2-channel stereo. Your car stereo will do some tricks to create a 5.1 effect from the 2-channel sound.

The CD, DVD and DVD DL indicator near the burn button is to give you a visual guide as to approximately how full your disc will be with the amount of content you've put in the Toast window. A CD holds about 700 MB, a DVD holds about 4.3 GB and a dual-layer (DL) DVD holds about 8.5 GB.

Feel free to ask more questions. As you can tell, Toast is something I know very well.

hello....
im in the process of burning my first audio dvd with tt7. i chose as many 'tunes'
as i could fit and left all the settings in their default positions. ITS TAKING FOREVER! cant say exactly but my guess is at least six hours have past. i feel confident that all wiill be well after reading your post...except for one thing.
you said"i hope you are using toasts media browser...."well i didn't even try it.
when i try find something with my finder in i tunes i am confronted by hundreds of unfamiliar files that bear no resemblance to my playlists. are you saying the toast browser will see my library as playlists? if so thats great news!
my question is: did i mess things up by dragging the playlists from itunes into toast?
cheers & thanks

Youval, the Toast Music DVD plays in the video DVD format. Since your car plays video DVDs it should play the Music DVDs.

The option to change the AC-3 encoding bit rate is at the bottom of the Custom Encoding window. You access this window by clicking Formats on the top left of the Toast window, then clicking More at the bottom. In the window that appears click Encoding and then Custom. You'll see Data Rate at the bottom. This is where you set the bit rate you prefer.

The long encoding time is a drag. You can see how far it has gotten by opening the Roxio Converted Items folder in your Documents folder. Each encoded audio file becomes a new file in the list.

The Media Browser is one of my favorite additions to Toast 7 over Toast 6. You might want to read about it in Toast Help or in the Getting Started Guide.

I don't think there is any problem dragging the tracks to Toast from iTunes, but it is just easier to use the Media Browser. There are situations with video DVDs when the Browser is the only way to go.

I forgot to respond to your question about converting to Apple Lossless as an intermediate step to encoding your MP3s.

When you convert from one compressed format to another you will lose some sound quality. This won't be a noticeable problem if you are a typical music listener. But you said you were going to delete the AAC files after converting them to MP3. This means you'll be keeping the lower-quality files. If you ever do other re-encoding (such as making AC-3 tracks) from these you are going to exponentially lower the quality of each generation you encode.

By first converting the AAC to Apple Lossless you come close to restoring the full quality of the tracks before compressing them to MP3. This minimizes the quality loss.

What I would do is directly convert to MP3 for the purpose of making the MP3 CDs, and then delete the MP3 tracks rather than the original AAC tracks.

thomas,
the disk i referred to yesterday finally finished last night and was ALMOST flawless. as i found all the menu themes ugly and corny i chose 'no menu"
that seemed to be an error as all the options i selected such as 'include smarlists' were absent. nuff said.......
so i erased and decided to redo it. problem is i did some re-editing of my tunes and now when i press record i get an error message:
CANNOT RECORD BECAUSE A FILE COULD NOT BE FOUND-RESULT CODE 43
I have NO CLUE as to how i can identify which file(s) is missing. do you think you could help me? cheers & later

Sorry you've had so much difficulty.

I'm not sure why you think the menus are ugly. I used the Snapshot theme for a Music DVD I did for my daughter (I used a different photo image for each track) and it looked really nice to us.

As for finding the missing file, the easiest thing to do is click the Edit button next to the playlist, then click Playlist. Now select the first track and press the play arrou. Pressing the double arrow skips to the next track. If it doesn't play then Toast can't find the file.

thomas......
thanks for getting back so quickly.
well, i followed your directions and listened to ALL 1000
tracks for a second and found none missing!
I am getting the error message almost immediately after selecting 'record' while the "bldg
track graphics" message is displayed. is it possible the alblum art associated with each song might be corrupted or missing somehow. much of the artwork i have used was found with google image search, drug to my desktop, and then
attached to each tune, i dont see how i could have messed that up as the image is there to see....any ideas?

YEAH!!!!!
I sorted it out. after i attached the artwork for one artist, i trashed it from my desktop, and went on to the next artist with a clean d'top. can you guess? tt7 couldn't find the images because they were in the trash! i restored all images to the d'top and i believe all will be well........

The 99-song per folder limit is part of the video DVD spec. There's nothing you can do about that. The spec allows 99 chapters per title and 99 titles per disc. Each of the tracks is equal to a chapter and each of the folders is equal to a title.