Mac OS X Bible, Panther Edition

Configuring CDs & DVDs Preferences

The CDs & DVDs preference pane allows you to configure the behavior of Mac OS X when a CD or DVD is inserted into the computer’s optical drive. The options that are available are configured in accordance to the type of optical media being inserted into the drive. There are five menus based upon optical media type, blank CD, blank DVD, music CD, picture CD, and video DVD, as shown in Figure 13-4. Details on each of the five menus are listed as follows:

Figure 13-4: The CDs & DVDs pane determines the behavior of Mac OS X upon optical media insertion.

• The When you insert blank CD pop-up menu provides the following choices: Ask what to do, Open Finder, Open iTunes, Open other application, Run script, Ignore.

• The When you insert blank DVD pop-up menu provides the following choices: Ask what to do, Open Finder, Open iDVD, Open other application, Run script, Ignore.

• The When you insert music CD pop-up menu provides the following choices: Open iTunes, Open other application, Run script, Ignore.

• The When you insert picture CD pop-up menu provides the following choices: Open iPhoto, Open other application, Run script, Ignore.

• The When you insert video DVD pop-up menu provides the following choices: Open DVD Player, Open other application, Run script, Ignore.

With respect to the five different media types, the options tell Mac OS how to behave when the media is inserted, as follows:

• Ask what to do: Tells Mac OS X that you want to be queried on how to deal with the disk.

• Open Finder: Tells Mac OS X that the disk should be accessible via the Finder. Selecting Open Finder facilitates the copying of files and folders to given optical media for drag-and-drop disk burning.

• Open iTunes, Open iPhoto, and Open DVD Player: Tell Mac OS X to open one of those applications respectively.

• Open other application: Tells Mac OS X to open a predefined application, such as Roxio’s Toast or the Mac OS X Disk Utility.

• Run script: Tells Mac OS X to run a specified AppleScript that can execute a sequence of actions. Although no actual scripts are provided with Mac OS X, you could make your own script. An example of such a script would be one that executed an automatic Finder backup of specified content to given optical media.

• Ignore: Tells Mac OS X that upon insertion of given optical media, do nothing.