Drag and drop?

[jbbevan]

Is there any way to use the CD-RW or DVD+-RW superdrive in my MacBook Pro in a drag and drop mode? I suppose that would take a new piece of software but don't know what that would be. I have Toast on an iMac G5 but it does not have that ability.

The ability does exist on "the other" platform. Nero offers InCD which formats an RW disc for drag and drop.

I'm running WinXP on Parallels on this box, but Parallels is not yet sufficiently advanced to support most of Nero...though I've installed and tried it.

Meanwhile, back at OSX 10.4.6 does anyone know of a drag and drop tool?

Thanks,
Jim Bevan

PS: I downloaded Help.App but using the same login that I just successfully used for this site, Help.App rejected my login (???). If we can get THAT connection made successfully, I'll be happy to make an annual contribution to your efforts. JBB

[MisterMe]

It is not clear what you mean. If you insert a blank optical disk into your drive icon will mount on your Desktop. You can then drag data files to it just like any other mounted volume. When you drag the icon toward the Trash, the Trash icon becomes the standard Burn icon. However, drag and drop will not create a media CD/DVD, on a data disk.

[jbbevan]

What I want is simple: I want to use a CD-RW like a floppy disk (of old). In the MS_PC world both Roxio and Nero offer software (usually referred to as packet writing) that accomplishes that end.

The act of dragging a file to the CD icon does the burning. That file can also be dragged from the CD-RW back into the trash thus freeing the space for other material. I guess in the realm of current technology it would work just like a USB flash memory stick.

It is difficult to understand what the purpose of the "RW" capability is if it cannot be used in this way.

If that capability is not supported in the Mac world -- I've only been in the Mac world for about 20 months -- then it is the first "thing" I've run across that actually got worse by converting to a Mac.

[nixgeek]

I've used both Mac OS X and Windows XP, as well as Gnome in Ubuntu Linux. All of them mount the writeable disc and allow you to drag and drop files to the disc. Once you've finished dragging your files over to the disc, each of these operating systems has an option to burn the files to the disc. I haven't seen it be used any other way.

What you're referring to sounds like a feature that was introduced y installing a third party application, and that is hardly the fault of the operating system if it doesn't do it. The one to blame here is Roxio since they own Toast. If you think they should have this feature on both Windows and Mac OS X versions of their software, let them know. But don't knock the OS for something none of the big three platforms do by nature.