Hi. Please forgive me for asking a question that has been answered and is explained on other websites -- I don't understand the explanations...

I am a pc-to-mac (osx 10.4.8 Intel iMac) convert. And I can't for the life of me understand the concept of images and what that means to the CD-burning process.

The PC method made sense -- the CD was a drive; you dragged stuff to a holding place and burned that info onto the CD. Then you could click on the CD drive and see the stuff.

I can't seem to translate the Mac instructions in my head. And, for the longest time I couldn't even see an icon representing the CD on my desktop, so I couldn't find it to eject it. The CD was not showing up in Finder as far as I could tell. Then I somehow stumbled onto the disc software that allows you to do stuff with the CD. . Now I can see icons representing the CD when I insert them, but I don't know how I got to that point.

None of the explanations seem as intuitive or as idiot-proof as most mac solutions turn out to be.

I have somehow successfully stored a downloaded file into the "holding area" (or equivalent) -- that info has gotten burned onto my last three CDs. Unfortunately, that file is not what I'm trying to burn onto the CD.

My goal is to burn .jpg files and have them readable by a MSWindowsXP PC.

Could someone please explain this? Thanks very much. mcaren

The help files for both Disc Utility and Finder have good sections on Disk Images.

I don't know, though, if you can create a cross platform CD in Disk Utility.

I use Toast for that functionality.

EDIT: Yes Disk Utility or Finder Burn does create what Roxio would call a "Hybrid" disk. Burned it on my Mac and it works fine on my PC.

The easiest way to do this is to use a Burn Folder
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html ... h2154.html

http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/ has a lot of good basic info for new Mac users

There is plenty more here
http://www.apple.com/support/tiger/

Thank you -- I haven't read all of the information on all of the links you provided, but the one that describes "burn folders" sounds pretty clear cut. I'll give it a try -- thank for your help!

I'd highly recommend get the program Toast for burning cd/dvds.

Somewhere along the way, I ended up with a Toast Lite CD. Never needed anything more.

Other than making hybrid CDs, what does Toast do that Disk Utility does not?

I've had luck mounting some images with Toast that wouldn't work when mounted with Disk Utility. I've got backups of some software as image files; when I mount them with DU, they aren't recognized by the installers, but they're fine when mounted as Toast. That's the only real reason I have Toast these days--I can keep track of a hard drive more easily than a bunch of CDs.

I use Toast for burning Video files to a normal DVD format. I really don't use it for its "data" services for burning images I normally just use Disk Utility

You might also take a look at an application called Disco. It creates a widget style interface where you drop your files and then click burn. It also has the ability to burn Video_TS folders on DVD's.

It's located at http://www.discoapp.com/

A lot. http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/toast ... rview.html

Burn is free and does all I need.

Data disks
With burn you can burn five different kind of disks.

Audio disks
With Burn you can burn Audio CDs and MP3 disks.

Video disks
With Burn you can burn four kind of video disks. VCD, SVCD, DVD and DivX disks.

Images and copy
With Burn you can burn three kind of images. Normal disk images, cue/bin images and toc images. And copy data disks.

Open source
Burn includes and uses open source utilities and is open source too.
Download the source.

Localization
Burn is written with localization in mind. Download Brazilian Portuguese localization (thanks to: Eduardo Lamblet).

http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/

Thank you all for your advice. I am trying to find as many open source options as possible, but any and all software recommendations are appreciated.

Among the features I use the most are spanning discs for backups and shrinking a 7GB movie to fit on a single 4.7 GB DVD.

I also use the companion, Spin Doctor, for ripping and cleaning vinyl.

I see a couple of nice features of Toast 8 are the ability to make a catalog of the disks you span and some very nice audio mixing features for making music CD's.

Also it has the ability to burn Blu-Ray disks for the early adopters.