Very good question you raise. - Lickableunix

'Yes, my question too! Hey, Apple, what happened to Data Burning in the Finder under OS X 10.4.x?!
First let me say: for several months now, Maarten Foukhar's Burn has been working very well for my simple manual back-up to CD-R needs, and free too! Five stars for it! *****
As for data disk Burning in the Finder:
In my experience, OS 10.2 Jaguar and 10.3 Panther were very good for data burning in the Finder.
What happened in 10.4 Tiger?
IMHO several factors combined to mess things up:
1. I believe there is more ~invisible~ automation where certain files are included in your burn which you may not want (and that there may not be room for on your CD-R.) Some of it is designed to be extra spiffy, but as far as I can tell, not nearly enough warning or specific info about this is available in the Finder, Preferences, etc. IMHO, it's way too hard to tell.
2. The Finder gets very wonky and might even crash (un-recoverably with force quit!) if you try try to remove files from your pre-burn set-up in order to have less than maximum capacity on the CD-R. In other words, if you try to put more than max capacity on the CD-R in the pre-burn formating step, you might easily ~crash~ your computer and be forced to do a hard restart! I say that's totally bogus, especially since the Finder is somehow adding (invisible?) files to the mix which sends you over max capacity of the CD-R. This is the only way I believe I've ever crashed my Finder in an un-recoverable system crash requiring a hard reboot under most if not all versions of 10.4.x. I have about 40 or 50 failed attempts: many hours of frustration and wasted blank CD-R's to prove it. I stopped trying and went to Maarten Foukhar's Burn and an external HD for my back-ups, after trying a few other Freewares.
3. DRM, "digital rights management" is now also interfering, I think. Perhaps some of this is not Apple's fault - don't know and I'm unable to elaborate at this time,
but your question is a ~great~ one to which I would certainly like have more answers, and in fact may be my largest beef with OS X version 10.4.8. I've even sent a postcard to the Finder development team in Cupertino on this very subject. The sent me back a brief, somewhat generic thank-you letter for my comments. Hope to hear more on this from people; power users etc.
very best regards,
smitty in New Orleans
iBook 1.33 GHz G4
1.5GB RAM

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Monday, December 11 2006 @ 05:36 PM PST