CD Session Burner 2.0 ($17 Demoware)
James Sentman

Sure, the disc burning feature that is built into Mac OS X can handle basic burning tasks, but it does have a few shortcomings. First, when dragging a file onto a writable CD, Mac OS X copies the entire file to a temporary location. Not a big deal for small files, but that can really waste time for larger files. Second, once you burn a CD, it becomes "closed" and can't accept any more data. If only there was a way to get around these "features"...

CD Session Burner offers a bunch of useful features in a single package. For one, you can use it to erase your discs, rather than having to muck around with Disk Utility. Secondly, you can, of course, use it to burn data to your discs, but the files are burned directly, without the time-wasting step of copying the files to a temporary location. Thirdly, and most notably, is multi-session support.

Note the Multiple Sessions on the Disc

Once you drag files to the program's file window, you can hit the Burn button, and they'll be burned directly to the disc; but unlike the Mac OS X built-in burning feature, the disc is not closed, so you can burn other sessions. When the disc is inserted into your Mac, each session appears as a unique CD. Before burning, you can choose to verify the resulting burn, eject the CD, perform only a test burn, or close the CD.

So make the most of your CD writer, and the space on your CD, and give CD Session Burner a try.

Have any other hot Gadgets? Send an e-mail to John, and he'll try it out.