CD Burning Software

Where can you store all the files resulting from scanning? CD-R is the most cost-effective option.

It takes less than a minute to prepare the files for the CD. Just click on the format you prefer, drag files from wherever you wish (you can mix and match files from any source connected to your system), and click on the burn baby burn button.

Panasonic CD-R burner, Adaptec Toast, DirectCD software.

When toasted, out pops your finished CD, with 650 MB (or 700 MB if you use the newer generation of CD disks).

From your Mac you can burn a CD that can also be read by a PC.

Toast, from Roxio, formerly Adaptec, offers all kinds of different formats (such as Direct CD) but I found that "Mac files and folders" is easiest.

Direct CD can only be read if the other computer also has Direct CD loaded and activated. It is quicker to burn with Toast than Direct CD. If you burn with Direct CD mode no one else can read your CD unless they have Direct CD, and have it active. This mode was a disaster.

Since you get both, you can experiment with both. Your results, or situation, may be different than ours.

A 4x burner (such as this from Panasonic that we bought from ProDirect) takes about 18 minutes. A 6x burner takes 12 minutes, an 8x burner takes 9 minutes. You can get a 12x burner from Smart and Friendly.

A few years ago, burning a CD was still sort of trial and error. The errors resulted in creating lots of frisbees, CD's that failed during the burn. The solution in those days was to prepare a special place to park the files you wanted to burn and then transfer them as a batch to the CD. This resulted in the creation of CD burners that had a Jaz drive attached to them. The idea was to move the files from your hard drive to the Jaz, and from the Jaz to the CD.

Nowadays those legacy solutions are a waste of time and an even larger waste of money. If your hard drives are not fast enough to send data to a CD burner you should be updating your hard drives with Seagate Cheetahs rather than throwing money away on a Jaz which does nothing when you are not burning a CD.

Today, with the newer versions of Toast, you can drag and drop from any drive on your system. You can drag some files from one drive and other files from another drive. There is no need to devote any time, or really any special attention, to preparing your CD burn. If you are spending more than 1 minute dragging and dropping you are doing something wrong.

If you are losing 10% of your CD burns then something is seriously wrong with your overall system. I have never bothered to run Norton Utilities and certainly don't have time to check each file to see if they are in "perfect shape." Besides, with 800 MB of RAM, restarting the computer is a major undertaking. I agree with the article that in-house burning of CDs is one way to stockpile images. The observation that CD-R seals the files and keeps them from being messed with is especially true. CD-RW is asking for trouble (someone accidentally changing a file).

Be sure to get one of the newer 32x CD burners (burns at eight times the speed). This means you can burn a CD in about 9 minutes. A 4x burner takes about 18 minutes. Although I have seen warnings that suggest you need special CD media for the 12x burners and higher, I am using generic Maxell CDs (in bulk spindles of 100 disks). They burn just fine at 8x speed. We are now using Maxell media for almost all our storage devices.