Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

CDs & DVDs

This handy pane (Figure 9-5) lets you tell the Mac what it should do when it detects you've inserted a CD or DVD. For example, when you insert a music CD, you probably want iTunes (Chapter 11) to open automatically so that you can listen to the CD or convert its musical contents to MP3 or AAC files on your hard drive. Similarly, when you insert a picture CD (such as a Kodak Photo CD), you probably want iPhoto to open in readiness to import the pictures from the CD into your photo collection. And when you insert a DVD from Blockbuster, you want the Mac's DVD Player program to open.

For each kind of disc (blank CD, blank DVD, music CD, picture CD, or video DVD), the pop-up menu lets you choose options like these:

• Ask what to do. A dialog box will appear that asks what you want to do with the newly inserted disc.

• Open (iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, DVD Player…). The Mac can open a certain program automatically when you insert the disc. When the day comes that somebody writes a better music player than iTunes, or a better digital shoebox than iPhoto, you can use the "Open other application" option.

  

  Figure 9-5. You can tell the Mac exactly which program to launch when you insert each kind of disc, or tell it to do nothing at all.

  POWER USERS' CLINIC: System Preferences: Under the Hood

  The entire System Preferences program is nothing more than a series of graphical front ends for underlying ...