deleting individual files from CD-RW

Hi Andrew,

There is no way to do what you are asking. The only way to accomplish deleting individual items from a CD-RW is to copy the CD-RW to your hard drive, delete the item you want to delete from the copied items, erase the CD-RW and burn the disc again.

Hope this helps...

Nope, no way to do it. Imagine hard disks, floppy disks, and flash drives at one end of the spectrum (true random access); and CDs and DVDs at the other end (session burning), CD-RWs and shareware utilities make burnable discs easier but they are still too far from the random access end of the spectrum. Windows seems to have some ways to make a CD-RW work like a floppy, but I don't think there's anything on the Mac that does it.

Or... you can thank Apple for treating permanent storage as permanent. By making it more difficult to remove items from a CD-RW, the chance of accidentally erasing a critical backup item is reduced.

Think different!

I'm sorry but that reminds me of that too-frequent Mac user rationalization: "if the Mac can't do that it must be wrong." CD-RW is not permanent media (the longevity isn't even as good) so it is incorrect to treat it as permanent. If one day Steve Jobs announced that Mac OS X could now use CD-RWs and DVD-RWs like floppies, I'm sure everybody would be like "Oh, Steve, you've a genius!"

I think you hit the nail on the head yourself:

CD-RW is not permanent media (the longevity isn't even as good) so it is incorrect to treat it as permanent.

So why would you want to attempt to treat it as permanent ? I've known way to many Windoze users who've been bitten by Microsoft's "better" features. Windoze is notorious for trying to stick nitrous in a Pinto ! It can be done but should it ?

Are you sure that Windows is allowing reuse of the space formerly used by the deleted file? Unless MS is using a non-standard filesystem or UDF, I'm not aware of any reliable way to reuse the space.

Adaptec's old DirectCD software allowed creation of UDF CDs that would act like a hard drive, but you had to finalize the disc (and thus make it read-only) to get it to read on any computer that didn't have DirectCD installed.

No, I'm sure that Windows is removing the file entry from the directory but the space is still used on the CD-RW.

In other words, as you delete files from the CD-RW, the amount of free space does not increase. The file is not visible but it is still on the disc and another file can not use that space until the entire CD-RW is erased.

Check this out: BurnAgain

That looks like it might be a useful utility, but it still does not indicate that it will allow you to delete individual files from a CD-RW.

Ditto what Duane said !