Mac Kindergarten

Mac OS X offers built-in support to burn CDs and DVDs. However, it offers limited options. Therefore we will look at a program called “Burn” to, you guessed right, burn CDs, DVDs and Audio CDs.It’s a freeware application (yes, free!), so we at Mac Kindergarten love it. Let’s take a closer look.

Installation

1) First of all, open up the home page of Burn.

2) Click the download link on the right side.

3) After the download is done, a so-called “zip” file is in your Download stack.

Zip files are a set of files, compressed into one single file. This is a common way to distribute files on the internet. Mac OS X supports all kinds of those compressed files, so the only thing you have to do is click it in the Stack, to open it.

4) Now the zip file is extracted and its original file structure comes to light.

5) You see the icon for the Downloads Stack has changed (it always displays the latest file added to the Stack). Click the Stack again to open it, locate the new item named “Burn” and click on that.

6) This takes you to the Finder and you see the entire content that was inside this zip file.

7) What is of interest for us, is the application itself. This is the red disk.

8) To install this application on your Mac, simply drag it to your Applications folder on the left hand side of the Finder window.

9) Finished, you just installed the freeware application Burn on your Mac. No Setup, no installer, just the pure application. Trust me, it’s that simple.

10) To start the “Burn”, navigate to the Applications folder in Finder, locate Burn and double click it (or press command-down arrow).

Usage

Burn is a pretty straight-forward program. The main window is quite simple. Let’s look and explore!

At the top you see 4, so-called “tabs” - Data, Audio, Video, Copy. Click on the kind that fits your need to burn a disk.Just below it you see a field, in which you can enter the name of the disk and select the filesystem. Don’t worry, it’s not as difficult, as this may sound.For data disks, choose Mac (HFS+) or Mac + PC, depending on the computer system the person who will use the disk works on. If you are not sure, choose Mac+PC for safety.For more information on the different types of disks, please refer to the build in help. You can access the help - as in any application - via the Help menu.

To add files to the disk, you are going to burn, select from the menu Items the menu entry Add and add the files you wish to add to the disk.

In case you added to many files, just select from the Items menu - Delete.The built-in help offers you more information on everything you can do with this program. Now there is only one more thing to do - as after every party - clean up.

Cleaning up the Download stack

Since we installed Burn into our Applications directory, we don’t need the extracted folder and the zip file any longer.Now, just open up the Downloads stack and drag the files directly from the stack to the Trash bin in the Dock. You can drag files from anywhere in the Finder to the Trash.Finally, control-click the trash bin and select Empty Trash.All done! Nice and clean - and on top of that a freeware program to burn disks. Nice!

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Tags: burning, freeware

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 2:10 pm and is filed under freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.