ITunes, of course, can burn MP3 music to standard audio CDs or the increasingly more common MP3 audio discs, which many car and home stereo systems can play and which can hold about 10 times as much music as a regular audio CD. IDVD can also import iMovie creations to make DVDs that play back on home-entertainment equipment. IPhoto can export albums and selections to iDVD, which can create interactive slide shows. Insert a disc and click Burn, and iPhoto can tell you whether the CD or DVD you inserted can hold your selection, but it doesn't offer to split up the photos across multiple discs. IPhoto lets you select an album that you've created from a subset of your entire iPhoto library, or you can select images directly from within the library. Mac subscription ($99 a year), according to its release notes. The Backup 2 software can also back up data selectively to CD or DVD, but even writing to a disc requires an active. You have to be sure to have enough space available on your main hard drive or partition to hold that data. For instance, insert a blank disc, and the Finder lets you mount it (or choose other behaviors as a default), copy items to it, and then choose Burn from the File menu or its Finder window.īehind the scenes, Mac OS X creates a virtual disc image that's the same size as the blank media you inserted. Mac subscription) is a 2 MB download.Īpple has scattered CD- and DVD-burning options throughout the Finder and its iApps (iPhoto, iDVD and iTunes). Apple's Backup 2 software (Mac OS X 10.2.6 or later. I tested Apple's own built-in tools, and two independent programs: Dragon Burn 3 from NTI ( $40, Mac OS X 10.1.5 or higher) and Toast 6 Titanium from Roxio ( $80, Mac OS X 10.2 or higher).īoth programs required significant downloads (6 MB and 21 MB) to update the shipping versions I received to bring them to full Panther compatibility. (Add-on DVD players don't work with iDVD.) A DVD burner that includes the newer DVD+RW format as well as DVD-R/RW costs $250 from the same maker. APS Tech ( offers a writer for $120 with FireWire or $150 over SCSI that can burn a full CD in under two minutes. It's also relatively cheap to add a fast CD burner to a non-burning Mac. Many users opt for SuperDrive, which adds DVD-R/RW for creating higher-capacity data discs or their own video DVDs. The burners always need their counterpart in software, to translate data and media into the right format out of zillions of possible combinations and options, with names and details that only the most dedicated geek truly wants to know.Īpple Computer ships most of its computers with a Combo Drive (DVD-ROM plus CD-R/RW or recordable/rewritable). (That's solved by an automatic feature or a prechecked checkbox now.) The newest devices have eliminated much of what made creating discs a hassle, including the dreaded Buffer Underrun error, in which your computer failed to provide data as fast as the CD needed it to burn onto the disc. It was like the discovery of fire: revolutionary, but also slow, awkward, painful and hard to reproduce correctly each time.ĬD and DVD burners, respectively, can write more than 650 megabytes and 4.4 gigabytes, which equates to thousands or even tens of thousands of songs or photos or hours of decent-quality video, or huge amounts of archival (not permanent) data. I recall how exciting it was when I burned my first CD.
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