Mac OS 9.2 and Mac OS X have built-in ability to burn CD-R and CD-RW disks directly from your desktop (from the Finder) without the need for any third party software such as Toast. Additionally, OSX has the ability to burn data DVDs from your desktop. The program used to burn disks is called Disk Burner and we'll refer to it as such. Disk Burner is not usually accessible directly but only through the Finder.

Your CD-R/W Rrecorder, i.e. the drive itself must be supported and recognized by the Disk Burner. Some third party, especially external and older SCSI drives may not work. If your Mac came with a CD-RW or Superdrive (DVD-R) drive installed from Apple then it's definitely supported. Most external FireWire and some external USB drives from major vendors (LaCie, VST/SmartDisk, Yamaha, EZQuest, QPS and OWC) are compatible. To find if your drive is compatible open the Apple System Profiler, click on "Devices and Volumes" tab, find your CD-R/W drive, expand the tree by clicking on the little triangle next to your drive, if you have to, and see what is says next to Disk Burning: supported or not supported. If your drive is not supported then you need Toast program to burn CDs.

The process of creating a CD using Disk Burner is nearly identical under Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.

Note: CD media comes in two sizes: 650 MB and 700 MB.

DVD standard is defined as 4.7 GB. However, due to filesystem overhead, you can store a maximum of approximately 4.2 GB of data on a single 4.7 GB DVD disc. Currently only the 2X and 4X DVD-R format is supported by Apple. DVD+R, DVD+RW is not supported and DVD-RW may not always work. The safest solution is to get the media directly from Apple Store. It takes 30 minutes to burn a full data DVD at 2X and 15 minutes at 4X. Burning video DVDs takes longer due to the time needed to encode the video into MPEG2.

When you insert a blank CD medium (or blank DVD in OSX), after a brief pause, a message will pop up asking you what you want to do with the blank disk. In OSX select Open Finder. Then give your disk a name and click OK. A CD icon will appear on the desktop. Simply drag and drop your files and folders to that disk as if it was another hard drive or a Zip disk. You can also open it and arange your files and folders. These files are actually stored in a temporary location and the CD is not recorded yet. Once you're done copying and arranging your files you can burn the disk. In Mac OS 9 go to the Special menu and select Burn Disk. In Mac OS X go to the File menu and select Burn Disk or Control-Click on th CD icon and select Burn Disk. Also, if you eject the disk MacOS 9 and X will also ask you if want to burn the disk or dicard what you've done so far. If you eject without burning your blank medium is not touched, temporary files are discarded and you will have to start the process all over when you insert the medium.

The default CD format created by this method is an ISO/HFS Hybrid that is actually readable by both Mac and Windows computers. The DVD format is UDF and it should be readable on all Windows XP, most Windows 2000/98/ME PCs. The Windows 2000, ME and 98 ability to read data DVDs depends on the version and service packs applied. If you want to burn a CD readable on a Windows PC then you also need to follow the filename conventions as described on the Toast page.

The disadvantage of this method is that you can't create multisession CDs, all disks are closed. Also, you can't create some more complex CD formats. For that, you will need Toast Titanium.