Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

CDs & DVDs

This handy pane (Figure 15-7) lets you tell the Mac what it should do when it detects that you’ve inserted a CD or DVD. For example, when you insert a music CD, you probably want iTunes (Chapter 9) to open automatically so you can listen to the songs or convert them to MP3 or AAC 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 into your photo collection. And when you insert a DVD from Blockbuster, you probably want the Mac’s DVD Player program to open.

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 appears that asks what you want to do with a newly inserted blank 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, then you can use the “Open other application”option.

• Run script. If you’ve become handy writing or downloading AppleScript programs (you know who you are), you can schedule one of your own scripts to take over from here. For example, you can set things up so that inserting a blank CD automatically copies your Home folder onto it for backup purposes.

• Ignore. The Mac won’t do anything when you insert a disc except display its icon on the desktop. (If it’s ...