CD RW Software

i'm sure under toast, if you dont tell it to close the disc after burning it you will be ok (well i think so!) it appear to work for me!

 

I don't think the poster means this...

Well actually, every time you make a new session with Toast, a new disk image is created. I think that there is not any program for Mac that can write into the same disk image after the first burning. Basically, I don't even think the OS X system will accept disks with this format.

Actually, I think that this feature you are looking for, is useless.

But, again, you may have a good use for it

 

no hijacking meant...

is there any way to write to a CD-RW after an initial burn (using finder)? whenever i try, it is write protected...

anyone know a cure?

Edit: Souldstorm must have been reading my mind!

 

oh sorry, i get it now! stupid me! humm... i have noticed that but not that it really bothers me so much! dont know a way around it though!

 

I feel the same way you do. When I switched to mac that was one of the features i missed when burning cds; you could burn to it multiple times.

Can I ask what you are using the discs for. If you are just transferring a small amount of files then I recommend getting a usb thumb drive. They are faster then burning a cd and are cross-platform compatible.

 

and more economical in the long run!

 

OK, basicly it does work exactly the same as using say Easy CD creator on a PC. On a PC, I can burn a CD, or CD-RW and leave the disk open and add things too it. Now The difference is the way that the OS itself handles drives. If I were to take a CD that I had left open and lets say burned to 5 times and put it in my Mac, I would get 5 CD icons appear on my desktop. Now in windows if I put the same disk in the drive, It will only show the D: drive or whatever it's called and show all the files on the disk in one place. So it's not actually a function of the program you use to burn, but the OS itself. Personally, I find that the OS trade off is well worth not being able to use a CD like a floppy disk.

 

You can burn multisession CDs with Disk Utility (or Toast).

http://macs.about.com/cs/osxbasics/a/burn_sessions.htm

 

When I first got a Mac, I searched around about this, and in my searching (which revealed no better answer than the one KingJr provided, natch), I found a lot of posts from people during the Panther beta phase, indicating that people thought Apple was going to make MS burns the standard for Finder with the release of Panther. Of course, they didn't. I don't suppose there's any hope Tiger will do this, or at least provide an option?

WinXP's Explorer manages to do MS just fine, without anything confusing or befuddling or dangerous. So I definitely consider it possible, and I don't see how it falls into the "no, a one-button mouse really is better" dimension.

OTOH, I could see that the drag and drop method, where files are continuously, instantly, written to the CDR/RW and the disk is treated virtually as if it were a hard drive, is dangerous, because of the incompatibilities you incur if you don't remember to "make the disc compatible" with other systems when you eject it.

But MS is a perfectly reasonable request, IMHO, and messing with disk utility and images seems like a lot of unnecessary hassle.

A couple of examples where I think it's valuable:

1) When I do research analysis, I used to be in the habit of making a new folder every day, titled something like 20040302 (for today), and dumping all my files -- journal articles I pulled, my manuscript, excel files, and so on, into it. The next day, when I open my SPSS output files or whatever, I save them in a new directory. That way, I can walk back through all of my past work very easily. At the end of every day, I burn the latest day's folder onto the CDR for archival purposes....

2) When I'm writing fiction, I also want to keep all old versions of all documents, so I can go back to them. I keep a CDR as an archive, and I'd like to burn each chapter onto it as I go.

So in both cases, it isn't really like a thumb drive. It's just that I'd like to incrementally archive parts of my data as I go. And obviously, I could get a network drive or whatever for that, but the hardware is already in my iBook that will do a perfect job of what I want. It's just a hassle....