Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

Easy CD Creator

You don’t need any add-on software at all to burn CDs in OS X. You can just drag files and folders onto the icon of a blank CD, if you have an external drive.

If you want fancier features—recording less common disc formats, for example—what you need is Toast for the Macintosh. It comes from the same company that makes Easy CD Creator.

Its main rival is Discribe (www.charismac.com). Both programs can create audio CDs, video CDs, data DVDs, and so on. Both come with a program that helps you turn old vinyl records and tapes into digital CDs, too.

The only disappointment: Neither program can treat a CD as a glorified floppy disk, as Easy CD Creator for Windows can, so that you can add and delete files freely (rather than burning the CD all at once).

There’s a workaround, though: Copy the contents of a rewriteable CD (a CD-RW disc) to a folder on your desktop; make whatever changes you like to the contents of this folder; and then burn the CD-RW again. (Use the Disk Utility program in your Applications→Utilities folder to erase the disc first.)

Tip

Ordinarily, the CD-burning feature of OS X burns the entire CD each time, even if you’ve only filled a small portion of it. But if you download the handy $17 shareware program called CD Session Burner, you can perform additional “mini-burns” of new data to the CD until all the space is used up. Each such session shows up on your desktop with its own icon, as though it’s a separate disc. You can download this program from www.sentman.com/CD_Session_Burner.html ...