Cocoa in a Nutshell

Disc Recording Frameworks

The ability to burn data to CDs and DVDs is a centerpiece of the Mac and Apple’s Digital Hub strategy. Nearly every Mac sold today can record to CD or DVD media. This creates an opportunity for application developers to provide features in their applications that take advantage of a system’s built-in disc burning capabilities.

With Mac OS X 10.2, Apple released two Objective-C frameworks that let applications take advantage of disc capabilities present in most new Macs. These frameworks are DiscRecording and DiscRecordingUI. Together, they provide an API for assembling content in preparation for recording and performing disc burn and erase operations.

The functionality of the Disc Recoding API is split between two frameworks for a good reason. DiscRecording provides the bulk of the API used for creating content and managing burn operations. DiscRecordingUI, on the other hand, provides no more than several NSPanel subclasses that implement standard user interfaces that applications can use to quickly configure and perform burn and erase operations. By separating the presentation from the mechanics, non-GUI applications can use the DiscRecording APIs. This section begins with a discussion of the DiscRecording framework and finishes with an overview of DiscRecordingUI.

The DiscRecording Framework

The DiscRecording framework provides classes that represent the fundamental parts of a recording process. DiscRecording has APIs that assemble filesystem hierarchies ...