Create multi-session CD-Rs in OS X

May 15, '02 01:28:44AM

Contributed by: robg

James Sentman announced today the "public beta" of his new shareware app CD Session Burner. CD Session Burner does only one thing, but it does it well - it burns multi-session CD's in HFS+ format. A multi-session CD is one which you write to multiple times, with each write creating a new volume as seen by the Finder (that's my non-technical description of how a multi-session disc behaves, at any rate!).

This is incredibly useful for those times when you need to burn some stuff to a CD-R, but you don't have enough to fill the disc. Instead of wasting one disc on a partial write, you can use CD Session Burner, write the data you need, and then add more to the disc later. It's also very useful for incremental backups, where you could create a "volume" for each day's backups, and keep several days worth of data on one CD-R.

I did manage to get the program to enter an error loop on me once; I dragged in a very large folder with a lot of sub-folders and package files, and got a "Item number XX is nil" (where "XX" is 1 to 4) message over and over. I'm not sure what caused it, and it only happened once. Everything else worked fine, and I'm now looking at a desktop covered with about 10 different volumes, all part of the same CD!

I'm still hoping this functionality may be included in Jaguar, but if it's not, then I'll be investing in a copy of CD Session Burner to provide some flexibility in how I use my CD-R media.

Comments (14)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200205150128445