disk burner is in use by another application

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disk burner is in use by another application

I'd seen a number of old posts regarding this error. You try to burn a CD from iTunes, e.g. when you say "Burn playlist to disc". It says "please insert a blank CD". You insert a blank CD. It says "checking media" then immediately displays an error message, "the disk burner is in use by an application other than iTunes."

I appear to have solved my problem as follows:

1. Quit out of iTunes.

2. Insert a blank CD.

3. The Mac OS will give you a prompt asking you for the default action for what it should do when you insert a blank CD.

4. Choose "Open iTunes" and click the check box "make this action the default."

iTunes itself may give you a message then, when the CD is in the drive; just click "don't show this message again."

Then iTunes seems to burn CDs okay after that.

Clearly a long standing bug though; I've seen posts from 2007 and earlier; I'm on Mac OS X Mavericks.

Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Dec 8, 2013 6:26 AM

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Answer 1

dbsaxman Author

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Dec 8, 2013 6:28 AM in response to dbsaxman

one more thing... it's still intermittently happening. But if you quit iTunes, then insert the blank CD, then let iTunes open automatically, then say Burn Playlist to Disc... then it seems to work.

As in other posts, maybe I've got some driver or something that's conflicting.

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Answer 2

mikebgx2

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Feb 10, 2014 8:30 AM in response to dbsaxman

I fixed this by killing the process which had the CD drive open. Make sure you know what you're doing first, potentially dangerous. To find the process, in a terminal window type: lsof | grep disk

Also try ejecting / removing any images that show in the lower part Disk Utility's list of open devices / images. If any of these say "in use" then search for and kill the offending process (take care, as above!) Use the lsof command as above, instead of xyz type the offending disk image name (or part of it)

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