Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

CDs & DVDs

This handy panel (Figure 8-3) lets you tell the Mac what it should do when it detects the insertion of a CD or DVD. For example, when you insert a music CD, you probably want iTunes (Chapter 10) to open automatically so that you can listen to the CD or convert its musical contents to MP3 files on your hard drive. Similarly, when you insert a picture CD (such as a Kodak Photo CD), you probably want iPhoto to open in readiness to import the pictures from the CD into your photo collection. And when you insert a DVD from Blockbuster, you want the Mac’s DVD Player program to open.

Figure 8-3. You can tell the Mac exactly which program to launch when you insert each kind of disc, or tell it to do nothing at all.

For each kind of disc (blank CD, blank DVD, music CD, picture CD, or video DVD), the pop-up menu lets you choose options like these:

• Ask what to do. A dialog box will appear that asks what you want to do with the newly inserted disc.

• Open (iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, DVD Player...). The Mac can open a certain program automatically when you insert the disc. When the day comes that somebody writes a better music player than iTunes, or a better digital shoebox than iPhoto, you can use the “Open other application” option.

• Run script. If you’ve become handy writing AppleScript programs (Chapter 7), you can schedule one of your own scripts to take over from here. For example, you can ...