Audio For Toast-Created Slideshow?

[John Bertram]

Sorry if this has been asked and answered a hundred times already (wasn't able to find a relevant thread after searching), but in the current version of Toast (11.1) is there not a way to just drag a file from from the Audio Tab in the Media Browser onto a slideshow that's part of a video-DVD I'm creating, and have that music be the background (and even loop if necessary) for however long that one slideshow takes to play?

 

It seems I can drag a song into the main panel on the left as its own Chapter(?), but when I try dragging it ONTO the actual brick for a particular slideshow, Toast says "no can do". And when I choose the Edit option for that slideshow, I'm not seeing a way to import an audio file to automatically play when that slideshow is selected.

 

Surely in 2013 there's a way to just add an audio file to a simple Toast-created slideshow, without having to create a whole separate slideshow in another program and then bring that as its own video+audio file into Toast?

 

Any suggestions as to the obvious thing I must be missing would be much appreciated!

 

Thanks,

 

John B.

[tsantee]

I agree that it should be possible but that is something no version of Toast can do. iDVD has that capability with its DVD slide shows and I think some other DVD-authoring apps on the Mac can do it. But not Toast. The only way to get audio with a slide show in Toast is to make a movie of the slides using an app such as iPhoto, iMovie, Fotomagico and others. In that case you're burning a movie rather than creating a DVD slide show.

[John Bertram]

Many thanks for your replies (incl the other thread re previewing a disc pre-burning).

 

I have to say though, for a commercial software now at Version ELEVEN, this is kinda shocking. Slideshows, but with no way to add any sort of audio at all? DVD menus, but with no proper way to preview how they're going to look or function?

 

And now I've discovered more surprises: I'd selected the option to "Play All Items Continuously", which seems to work for the individual video files I've dragged in, but for the Toast-created slideshows which are inserted after every 2-3 video files, when they get to the final slide, instead of proceeding to the next item (i.e. the next video file on the disc), Toast loops back to slide #1 and just repeats the slideshow. And I'm not seeing any way to override that. Is there one?

 

Plus I'm reading in other threads that I can't manually name individual chapters? Is that also true?

 

Added together, this makes Toast, for me but I suspect for many other users as well, virtually useless as even a basic disc authoring tool.

 

So I guess it's back to trying to do this project (which I naively thought would be a dead simple one, done as a quick favor for a client/friend) in iDVD. And ironically, the only reason I'd switched over to doing it in Toast was iDVD's apparent lack of a "play all items continuously" option -- which also seems achingly basic -- but which I now find doesn't really work in Toast either, if you have a mix of video files + slideshows as this project does.

 

But at least some of those other basic functions do still work in iDVD, so I guess my friend will just have to live without the continuous play option -- cause I simply don't have the time to pull out a big gun like DVDStudioPro just to get some of the basic functionality this project needs.

 

 

But I have to wonder in the meantime if Roxio is even developing the disc-authoring aspect of Toast at all anymore. It seems unlikely, given the inexplicable (and at Version 11, downright embarrassing) lack of so many near-Beta features in that area.

 

 

As always though, many thanks to tsantee for the solid (albeit disappointing!) info.

 

Cheers,

John B.

[tsantee]

Thanks for your summary, John. Yes, Toast is weak in its authoring options. I don't think this will ever improve because the changes since Toast 6 have been minor in this area. iSkysoft and Wondershare both sell what I think is the same app under their different brand names called DVD Creator. It looks promising.