The microscopic spectral density of the QCD Dirac operator at nonzero baryon chemical potential for an arbitrary number of quark flavors was derived recently from a random matrix model with the global symmetries of QCD. In this paper we show that these results and extensions thereof can be obtained from the replica limit of a Toda lattice equation. This naturally leads to a factorized form into bosonic and fermionic QCD-like partition functions. In the microscopic limit these partition functions are given by the static limit of a chiral Lagrangian that follows from the symmetry breaking pattern. In particular, we elucidate the role of the singularity of the bosonic partition function in the orthogonal polynomials approach. A detailed discussion of the spectral density for one and two flavors is given.