jazzbuph

This has been an on and off issue with Toast for years. There was a long period about 5 years ago where the mounting of sd files stopped working. After a couple of versions and lots of complaints, it suddenly was restored again. I use toast mainly to back up CDs by burning to disc, and then mounting them later. This is also important because if I no longer have the CD, it's the only way to import into iTunes and get the track retrieval and stuff like that. I'm now unable to mount discs again with v16, even though it worked up until a few months ago. I'm still on High Sierra, so going to Mojave is not the issue. So I don't know if it's an update in High Sierra, or an update in Toast, that started the problem/removed the feature. BUT IT"S A BIG DEAL! Without this, I simply won't be using Toast anymore. And it screws me unless other tools will mount them and allow for the track information rather than just a single huge file. I simply don't understand why they remove this feature...and,, as noted, when burning to disc creates an sdII file! It doesn't make sense. Roxio! Get it together!!!

Wow! I have continued to see replies from this thread for the couple of years since I posted extensive reviews of this problem. I never expected to see what has come through now and been apparently verified - that the mount disc image feature works again! While clearly Roxio is incredibly lame for not addressing this for so long, nor even replying to or commenting on this thread along the way, I like to think that the efforts of all involved here had something to, finally, do with the feature being fixed. Nice job guys! Thanks Lief for letting us know, and to whomever the person was that verified. I had no intention of buying Toast anymore, but perhaps now I will get the new version, feel better about upgrading to Yosemite (which I have yet to do), and feel slightly more secure that all my sdf backups are not yet obsolete. The small victories in life

Hi Ibiza, One thing I left out of my last missive is that I did attempt to use Toast 11 after starting up in "Safe Mode," and that didn't work either. You mention that "if it works logging to to a Guest Account." I didn't notice that mentioned anywhere above in other messages. Have you done that? did it work? I'd be surprised. You might try calling Roxio, and after explaining (again) the problem, and armed with the info that Toast 10 works (even though unsupported), perhaps they would allow you to shift your license to v.10, or have some other solution that would allow you to do so. It sounds like it would be worth a shot. Good luck!

OK, final entry... Short answer - In the end, I uninstalled (thoroughly!) Toast 11, and re-installed Toast 10.5. It offered to update it to 10.9, but so far I have refused. Roxio says that v10 is not supported for Mt. Lion, but that with the last update, it should work. 10.5 opened fine, and immediately started mounting all my sd2f files with no problem! I had previously tried 10 after already installing 11, and had the same issues with crashing, so obviously it was drawing off some of v11 install. But by itself, it works well. As well, it still translated my flac files into sd2f format with no problems as well. So my recommendation for the original poster is to get hold of Toast 10 and use that. As I have a dedicated machine for my music library that I don't use for burning CDs (though I don't think it would matter) or any other conversions and such, I will happily use Toast 10 on that machine until it doesn't work anymore. I can still use Toast 11 on my other machines that I do other stuff with. I did come to this solution after trying a number of other things. There are several file conversion tools out there that are good, so that if I had to go back to my original flac library and rebuild, I could have done this. I tried XLD, xACT, and Max. Of the 3, I liked Max the best. The problem with it is it hasn't been updated since 2009, and is still in a version under 1.x. But it worked fine, and easily had the best interface, allowing manipulation of the files, editing of the metadata, and editing of the album image all in one happy screen. As well, once you had it together, it would export AND put the files properly into the iTunes library such that everything showed up in iTunes without a separate import necessary. So it worked great, with one caveat. If you have all the metadata already embedded in your Flac files, this will be awesome. But, if not, then you have to enter it in yourself. For me, I have a large library of live recordings that don't have metadata embedded. The whole point of using Toast to create sd2f files and being able to mount them as a CD is to be able to import them from the CD into iTunes, such that iTunes will then scope the Gracenote CDDB and enter the info automatically. iTunes doesn't do this if you simply Add Files to the library, or drag them in. It won't access Gracenote unless files are imported from a CD. Due to the large community of live tapers, most of the recordings have been entered, and simply need a little format editing for me to make them the way I want. Much faster than manually entering all the info (especially each song title). The problem with Max, xACT and XLD is that they don't access Gracenote, presumably because it's not free. They access freedb and musicbrainz, neither of which seem to have any of the live recording info necessary. So while Max worked really great for my CD backups, and my own recordings that I've entered my personal metadata into, it was not so great for the live library. This is what drove me back to checking out Toast 10 w/o v11 installed. In the long run, those sd2f files will become obsolete if Roxio doesn't bring that feature back. Fortunately, I still have all the flac files as backup, and redundant backup of my music library as well, so that trustfully I'll never have the need to go back and re-process all that again. I had forgotten that Roxio had been bought out by Corel, and this is a major red flag! I've had many software titles from the creative side of the fence over the years that Corel bought and either terminated or obsoleted features on, etc. without warning, and no intention of updating or bringing back. So I'm not fond of Corel, and have little hope for Toast maintaining good functionality going forward. So find your alternatives now! it's just a matter of time. Cheers,

Thanks for that. Actually, I was having the same freeze problem with earlier versions of 11 (and even 10 on Lion, but perhaps because 11 was also installed and it was pulling of its preferences). So perhaps it's a system thing combined with Toast? I never had the problem with Snow Leopard or earlier that I remember. What system are you running? Cheers...

Hi there, In trying to better understand what you wrote, I took one of the sdf files and put it in the Convert section rather than the audio CD section. I don't see any options about exporting them to iTunes. I can export them to .aiff files, as they were originally written, but then still have to drag the files to iTunes. The problem with that is this... You still have to then write in all the info in iTunes. When Toast worked the way it is supposed to, it would mount the .sd2f file exactly the same way as a CD in the finder, with all its tracks (as you note in your last linie that you're not aware of any app that does that). Toast did this for years and years, and I have relied on it for that very reason for those many years. Now it creates those files, but does not mount them again properly. This is the problem. When it did do that as advertised, you then can import the files from within iTunes, which means that iTunes properly labels them, gets album art if applicable, and treats it as an imported album. This saves hours of work of re-labeling music artists, album names, year, genre, and any other info that has already been included with the files before turning into an sdf image in Toast. It would be nice if Roxio fixed this, or if it doesn't plan to, at least make a statement as such and why so we know what to expect going forwards and can make different choices about how to go about getting our work done. Thanks for your help though. The crash reported diagnosis was interesting. If you have any interface with Roxio, please bring this to their attention. It is the main thing I use Toast for, and there are other and less expensive choices for just burning discs. Cheers...

Hi there, I totally get the problem you're having, as I have the same needs and the same problem. I have used Toast to do this for years, over the course of many versions. With version 11 and Lion, it started having problems such as you've stated. It freezes and won't come back after a force quit until after a total machine reboot. I finally eliminated all Toast apps and files from anywhere on the computer, did a clean install of Mountain Lion, then re-installed Toast from scratch and updated to the newest version. My first 2 attempts at mounting discs worked. Then it started mounting the sdf files as a single track, not reading the multiple tracks in the file. It takes awhile for it to do this, which is my first clue that there's a problem. If it crashes, it comes back. But it is still unreliable. Even with new audio disc images that Toast itself creates, it still won't mount them! If you bring the file in to the Audio area, it reads it fine, and will allow you to burn a CD from it. Of course, with thousands of files, this is quite impractical. But right now, at least with Toast, it seems the only solution. I came across this thread with a Google search to try to find an alternative to Toast that will mount these sdf audio image files, and this came up as the first thing in the search, so I've checked it out. It would be nice if Roxio would address this, and any time now would be good! I've gone months without being able to mount and use the images I have that Toast itself has created, and that I use as the main feature of the program. BTW, just so you know, there is a keyboard shortcut for the mount image command - Shift-Command-M. This will bring up the dialogue asking for where the image is you want to mount. It's handy.... when it works! :-) ROXIO! HELP US OUT HERE!!!!