Peter Lyons

OS X and CD burning non-smartness

October 19, 2010

So since making the linux to Mac transition, I have this mindset of things on the Mac are supposed to "just work" and be fantastic and marvelous and flawless. This preconception was shattered again when I tried to burn some CDs recently. I downloaded and ISO and tried to burn it with Finder. In Ubuntu, if you try to burn a single .iso file to disc, it prompts you that you probably want to just make a disc from that CD image, and thus does the right thing. Not so on the Mac. It happily spit out a data disc containing a single .iso file. Duh. Then I went to burn a music CD using some .wav files a friend sent. Again, on Ubuntu, if you ask it to burn a CD of just .wav music files, it suggests that you burn an audio CD automatically. Mac, nope. Data CD with .wav files. Facepalm. In case you're curious, yes I did figure out that you need to use Disk Utility on the Mac to burn the .iso file and iTunes for the music CD. I thought this was supposed to be seamless?