Roxio

What horrible tech support!

Earlier this year, I purchased a copy of Roxio's Toast Titanium 10 with the HD plugin option. Altogether, about $120. Not cheap.
I had a problem with Toast not correctly multiplexing recordings from my Hauppauge HD-PVR. During the muxing process, Toast will just quit muxing prematurely and move on to the next stage without warning, leaving you with an incomplete recording (which you could easily miss if you don't check your results carefully.) Now granted, this was not happening all the time and when it did happen, it seemed to be with more problematic recordings from VHS. But, the thing is that the same file would mux correctly using other software tools. So Toast obviously had a problem.
So I contacted Roxio tech support.
I won't bore you with all the details, but it took about a month to get a response. And when I did get a response, it was the standard uninstall-reinstall advice. I sent them the output from my System Profiler. They replied they couldn't open it. Which says to me their tech support people are doing Mac support on Windows machines. I asked them "What next?" and even suggested they allow me to upload samples they could process themselves and see the problem. Their response was "Considering the extensive, unsuccessful trouble shooting attempts of your problem we are unable to offer you any further solutions for your issue and will have to discontinue any further support." So they consider uninstall-reinstall extensive. They did offer a refund. I told them I didn't want a refund (besides, considering how things had gone up to that point, I'd never see the refund anyway), I wanted them to support their software. That's basically where it ended.
So, in my opinion, Roxio has no tech support.


Don't get me wrong, there are some good things about this software package and it is a very important package for the Mac as there are few alternatives for some of the functionality in this package. Which makes it all the more frustrating that it is not supported.


So if you are someone who gets very annoyed with this kind of lack of support, you might want to look at other alternatives if possible. If not, it is a very useful software package to have. I'm just not confident about it's future.

The New Apple TV

The New Apple TV? Not so much. At least not for me.
All streaming, all the time? No thanks.
With the old Apple TV, when I'm listening to music, it's not putting additional load on my computer. With the new Apple TV, I'm using two devices just to listen to music.
I like to own my media and store it locally. In fact, I insist on it.
720p? Still? Are you kidding?
I can't see this new Apple TV as anything but a step backwards.
I'll be hanging on to my old Apple TV for as long as possible.