A user had the following experience after inserting a blank CD in preparation to create a music CD:
Disk Utility started, but no disk icon appeared on desktop.
Well, that makes it rather difficult to copy files to the CD.
The disk icon won’t appear on the desktop, or in Places in Finder, if you have "Open Disk Utility" as the default action when inserting a blank DVD/CD.
In this case, it appears that the user had "Open Disk Utility" as the default when a blank DVD/CD is installed. That’s a mistake, in my opinion. If you want total control over what happens when you insert a blank DVD/CD, the default action is unchecked so that you get the following prompt when a blank DVD/CD is inserted:
Notice that the box for "Make this the default action" is not checked, and the above prompt shows up when I insert a blank DVD/CD.
The pop-up menu is exposed here to show what actions are possible.
When I select “Open Finder,” the DVD icon should appear in Finder as a folder under Places:
Now you can simply drag and drop files into that folder. When you have them all there, just click on the burn icon and in a few minutes you have your CD ready to use.
If the CD icon doesn’t automatically get removed after burning the CD, right click on it and select “Remove from Sidebar”:
So how do you unset the default action when you insert a blank DVD/CD? Go to System Preferences and open “CDs & DVDs”…
Change your preferences to “Ask what to do”.
Take back control over what you want to do when you insert a blank CD or DVD. Maybe you would prefer to set the default action to “Open Finder” so that you can then start copying files to it.
When you copy files into a blank DVD/CD this way, the files aren’t actually copied right away. The filenames you see there are just placeholders. The files actually get copied when you start the burn process.
However, if you are like me and you use Path Finder as your default browser, you get the following in Places:
And when you copy files into that folder, you actually do copy the files to the DVD/CD at that time. Notice that there is no burn icon there. So, in order to burn the DVD/CD, you should have the burn icon in the tool bar of the browser:
This simplifies having to search around for how to do a burn after copying files to a blank DVD/CD.
And by the way, don’t forget to rename the folder before you do the burn.