How to duplicate CD on a Mac

My daughter’s music CD for her skating short program got badly scratched and because it was the last-but-one copy as skater you need many copies, in case you loose/forget/scratch/misplace it,  I was confronted with the task to create a new copy. Rather than starting Nero on Win-XP notebook, I have decided to learn finally how to do it on Mac. It must be simple, intuititive and much easier than on Windows. Right ? Wrong To my big surprise, there was no easy, idiot proof, very obvious way mac-ish drag and drop way how to acomplish it. It was not exactly hard either, but it actually took consulting the omniviscent Google to find it out. To save the search for the next time, I’ll write it down. Here is what you have to do:

1 Create a disk image from source CD

Insert the source CD the one you want to copy

Open the Finder, open Applications, then Utilities, and start the Disk Utility program

In Disk Utility, select File -> New -> Disk Image from Folder

The Finder will appear – select whole CD and click on the Image button

A new dialog box will appear. In the Where box, choose Desktop. In the Image Format box, choose DVD/CD master

Click Save

Now a new file will be created on your Desktop, titled the name of your CD with a “.cdr” extension. This file is a disk image of your CD. Btw, it works even if you do not select cdr format and write disk as generic Disk Image .dmg.

Now you need to burn it on new, blank CD:

2 Create new CD from a disk image

Eject your original CD from the CD drive

Return to the Disk Utility program.

You should now see the disk image of your CD on the left hand side, typically at the bottom of the list. Select the image, and then click on the Burn button

Follow the directions and insert a black CD-R disc when prompted

You can repeat step 2 as many time you need, of course . Next time I am going to use the image, of course assumed that it will be still the same music. Thanks to Spotlight magic, I am sure I will be able to find it, because I used proper, descriptive and obvious name “track 86.cdr”. Just kidding .

What do you think – why did not Apple make this process easier – as they did for many other chores ? Has it maybe anything to do with the fact that copying CD can be and quite often is used for copyright violation activities ?

via How to duplicate CD on a Mac « Miro’s World.