I bought a Mac Mini a couple of months ago and am still struggling with learning how to do the simplest things. For instance, tonight I told S “sure I’ll be happy to copy your CD of dance tunes.” And figured, let’s try to copy it using the Mac. I mean, how hard can it be?
Inserted the CD, it appears on desktop and iTunes autostarts. I select all tracks and click ‘copy’, then close iTunes (after searching every menu and not finding any items remotely resembling ‘copy CD’), I then eject the music CD and insert a blank disk which appears on the desktop as ‘Untitled CD’. When I click on it and select ‘Paste’, I get the following message:
“The items on the Clipboard cannot be pasted to this location. One or more of the items may have been deleted or are no longer available.”
Nice, very nice. I go through the entire process again, ejecting the blank, inserting the source, copying the tracks to the clipboard, ejecting the source, inserting the blank, with the same result (proof that I’m crazy).
What else to try? Oh there’s a Disk Utility program, that sounds promising. I fire it up and it has a ‘Burn’ item — cool… but when I click ‘Burn’ it wants an image. It won’t burn individual files. Hmmm…do I actually have to create an image of the source CD first? Well sure, why not, I’ve already wasted enough time…
I eject the blank CD, insert the source CD, iTunes autostarts, I select all the tracks and click ‘Copy’, and quit iTunes. Switching to ‘Finder’, I notice that ‘paste’ is greyed out in the Edit menu — telling me that whatever iTunes copied, it wasn’t to the clipboard. So I click the CD icon on the desktop and select ‘Copy Audio CD’, and check the ‘Edit’ menu in Finder. This time ‘Paste’ is enabled. OK, I eject the source CD and insert the blank. Click the ‘Untitled CD’ icon on the desktop and click ‘Paste’… and up pops the message
“The items on the Clipboard cannot be pasted to this location. One or more of the items may have been deleted or are no longer available.”
Hmm… didn’t I figure out I needed to create an image that I can burn? How do I create an image from the source CD? I eject the blank and reinsert the source CD; iTunes dutifully starts, I select all tracks and Copy just for good measure before closing iTunes. Now I’m looking at the menu of the ‘Audio CD’ desktop icon and notice the item called ‘Duplicate’. Is this the answer to my quest? I take a breath and click it, and immediately a folder is created on the desktop labelled ‘Audio CD’ and a Copy dialog pops up, with status of copying the items. Well at least it’s copying something to somewhere — seems like progress. Hopefully when it’s done I can copy the folder contents to the blank CD. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of “Frog learns to use a Mac” right after these messages…
Allright, the copy completed, I ejected the source disk and inserted the blank disk and it appears on the desktop and I open the ‘Audio CD’ folder and select all items and click Copy and click on the ‘Untitled CD’ icon and click Paste and… nothing happens.
Just for giggles I click ‘Open’ on the ‘Untitled CD’ icon and am amazed — all 19 files appear in a Finder window, and there’s even a ‘Burn’ button on the upper right corner! Yes! I click the ‘Burn’ button, and after an ‘are you sure?’ dialog, the Mac displays the following message:
“Untitled CD” is too large to fit on the disc. Remove some files and try again.
This is weird since the files were just copied from another CD which originated from the same stack that this one came from. It seems unlikely that the files got bigger just by being copied from the CD to the desktop folder. What’s going on here?
Well the short solution is, go downstairs and copy the darn CD using my linux laptop. But I’ll give the Mac one last try. I click on the ‘Audio CD’ folder icon and open it in Finder, then see on the Finder menu the item ‘Burn ‘Audio CD’ to disc’ — cool. I click it, and the ‘Burn Disc’ dialog appears stating “This disc will be burned with the contents of ‘Audio CD’. You need a disc with a capacity of at least 780.5 MB.”
Well shiver me timbers matey — both of these CDs are 700 MB Verbatim brand disks from the same spindle. Why does Mac want to make the copy bigger than the source?
OK downstairs to the linux box. Wasted too much time already. Stupid Mac.