Saturday, June 14, 2008

Burn: The best optical disk burn solution for OS X.

I love Burn.

I've tried tried other commercial alternatives, particularly trying to get rid of the invisible .DS_Store and other dot files OS X can put on CDs.

They flopped. I was back to using the built-in burning tool, but it doesn't let me readily enforce the lowest common denominator (PC Juliet) standard, and I'm not sure it fully excludes the treacherous dot files.

Today though, my OS X gave me the ridiculous 0x8002006D error message during a burn. That means something is wrong. Helpful.

I fired up Burn for the first time. Simple. Lets me set PC Joliet easily. Shows dot files so I can remove them. It also showed the error, but said my CD burner couldn't calibrate. That's really helpful, it suggests a hardware problem. I blew in some compressed air and used a different CD and it completed the burn.

Great app. Open source and free. If they provide something other than PayPal for donations I'll send money.

As for the burner -- well, this is a G5 iMac. Those machines should never have been made. Fantastic heat problems, especially with the buggy hardware control software Apple used for the first year or two of the G5 iMac life. I suspect the DVD is another victim of too much heat for too long -- this machine is heading for the scrap heap at age 2.7 years. Not happy.

I'll try more CD cleaning methods of course. The compressed air jet was a quickie.

Update 6/15/08
: Rich T says Simply Burns is also very well done.

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