Is my Mac Pro 2009 unable to burn Cd masters?

As far as I can tell, no Mac software supports Disk at Once. However, your Mac Pro does support Windows. It may be possible with Boot Camp. I'd check in that forum to see if it is.

Hi EdHart and welcome to Discussions,

Golden Hawk has an informative website about DAO http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9632453&#9632453 together with a list of compatible writer.

But if the drive itself does not support DAO, no software can enable it.

Regards

Stefan

Toast supports DAO, and has for years and years.

Hi EdHart,

my 2006 Mac Pro has a Sony DW-D150A inside and System Profiler also shows no DAO for it (only TAO and SAO for CDs, but DAO for DVDs).

Stefan

WaveBurner (Logic Studio) is supposed to burn cd masters. So it must support DAO.

Why must it? DAO is a feature that allows for multiple rewrites making a CD like a hard drive. The only multi-rewrite ability Macs have with CDs are the following with these kind of media:

CD-R - multisession buring. Meaning you can burn one session, which is permanently engrained, and an additional session can be added to existing empty space.

CD-RW - multisession and total rewrite. You can erase the entire disk and burn again.

DVD-RAM - Like a hard drive, you can rewrite any section of the disc.

DVD-RW, and DVD-R have comparable features except more space than CD-RW and

CD-R respectively.

Magneto optical - never offered as a built-in option, only available third party, supports special discs with DVD-RAM like features.

DAO from what I've read before on the forum enables DVD-RAM like features for CD-R discs. It is this feature that no Mac OS X application that I've seen actually supports.

Why DAO was never included with Mac OS X I don't know, but you can always submit feedback asking for it:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

To add to that, there are many CD masters which have no rewrite capability. So the statement that if it has CD master capability, it must have DAO, doesn't make sense. In fact I've never seen a CD master with rewrite capability.

DAO (disc-at-once) has nothing at all to do with the capability of rewriting discs or treating it like a hard drive. It has to do with burning the disc in a single pass, rather than one track at a time (track-at-once or TAO). This allows any amount of audio data, or no data at all (i.e gapless) to be written in the "pre-gaps" between tracks. If the laser is turned off in the mastering of the CD, it is not Red Book standard. It has to be a single pass burn.

Hi Ed,

Yes it certainly could be that the drives they put in last year's Mac Pro's support DAO and the one's they put in this year's models don't. But in this day and age, I would be shocked that Apple would supply a Mac Pro with an optical drive that can't do a simple DAO burn. What is the model number of your drive?

EdHart wrote:
Stephan, Can you burn audio cd's without a pop at the end of the cd's?

Hi,

I have to admit that up to now I never even burned an Audio-CD with my Mac Pro since I didn't need to.
I use this drive mostly for installation of applications and very seldom for backup of files onto DVDs.

Stefan

Hi Stefan,

Do you know what CD-Raw is?