Yaeonku external cd drive only reads dvds and doesn't recognize it as disc burning device. Manufacturers and other customers confirm MacOS compatibility

nightwingisromani wrote:

Are you dense? I literally said the device was working.

So it is recording? Great!

But it’s not recording, is it?

Having spent most of a decade designing and writing CD and DVD burning software for an operating system, optical drives are incompatible messes and too often with buggy firmware.

The only optical recording drives I ever found that were reasonably compatible across the entire vendor product line were Plextor. Other vendors either had firmware issues, or had substantial firmware differences between devices.

Some of the better known vendors had optical drives with some hilarious bugs, too. One of the more memorable optical drives occupied about two thirds of the entire USB bus bandwidth doing errors and retries. Another major vendor had a two-byte slip about two thirds of the way through recording. That one was fun to find.

And underlying this all, different optical drives react differently to host commands. If yours refuses to record, then insufficient power, a hardware issue in the recording path, or host-device compatibility issues are all among the possibilities. And even if Apple decides this is a bug in their macOS recording software, it’ll take a while for the fix to be tested and released. If Apple decides to fix it. And they’ll likely suggest testing with macOS 14 as that becomes available in two weeks or so, though that’s incompatible with a MacBook Air from 2015.

If the optical device vendor states this works, and it doesn’t, then the most expedient options are to return it for a replacement, or return it for refund and get a different optical device.

my macbook is the issue, not the drive.

Contact Apple Support, then.

I did a search on that brand name and found an Amazon listing for a bus-powered drive. Is your drive bus-powered? If so, how is it plugged in to the MacBook Air? If it is, say, through an unpowered hub, you might have problems with reliable burning apart from just getting the drive recognized as a burner.

Contact the device vendor and request assistance or request a refund, and acquire a device that works.

Apple SuperDrive works, though a USB-C to USB-A adapter that can provide sufficient power is required. The Apple adapter can provide enough power. Various third-party adapters and hubs may not. Some of those will specifically exclude SuperDrive.

I’ve also used an old Compaq DVD+/-RW external drive with an external power supply, and that worked.

nightwingisromani wrote:

The device does work. My macbook itself is having issues recognizing the device. It wont acknowledge it at all.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this forum thread would not exist if the device were working, so the device is not working, which means maybe the device needs more power than the adaptor or hub can provide, or maybe means a discussion with the device vendor, or maybe means replacement with a different device that… well… won’t lead to a forum thread.