[Zoom]

There used to be a hack to get my Sony CRX200E1 to work in my G4/400, but apparently this no longer works in Panther. This is a snippet of an article from xlr8yourmac:

You selected 10.3 as the OS so assuming you're running Panther now. (That's even worse for unsupported drives)
And as noted in the past here - literally every OS X update overwrites the modified plugins with apple's standard ones - even 10.1.x updates (and 10.2.x updaes - each minor "." update version did this typically) and 10.1 plugins are not compatible with 10.2. (For 10.2.x - use patchburn utility linked in the FAQ here) - but for 10.3, the individual plugins for 10.1.x and 10.2.x are not used and not compatible.

The main site Misc/OS topics page has a past article on Panther Burn Support mods (revised many times since June 2003 and noted in the news pages at the main site several times in the last 2 months. It's not as easy to add burn support in 10.3 though...

I checked the Misc/OS page, and didn't find much there, either. (God, I wish they would clean up the format at that site - it's so confusing to try and find the latest info, it's all mixed up with older info.)

This is so damn stupid - why the hell does Apple block the use of so many third party products?? That really pisses me off. It shouldn't be this damn hard. Makes me feel like a PC user trying to find drivers.

Anyway - does anyone know how to re-enable my Sony drive for burning in iTunes?

[Kami]

The Misc/OS page has a link called Panther/10.3 Disc Burning Support Mods

Here is the direct link to the relevant page:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/panth....html#storytop

You will see a link to download the iTunes patch near the top of the page. Directions are included

[Zoom]

Yeah, I read that, and it didn't sound very promising. Took him multiple "tries" and inserting disks to get it to work. Didn't inspire much confidence. Then he goes on to say that he avoided it and suggests replacing the entire frameworks thing after editing a read-only file...

I actually even went to the patch page, and when I initially scanned it, the first part didn't sound encouraging, either. But I went back and re-read it all, and I realized that the real solution was at the bottom.

It sounded more promising, but then I realized that it was for iTunes 4.1, and I have 4.2. Does it work for 4.2? Has anyone tried this?

Again - it should NOT be this damn hard.

[CIA]

Or you could just sell your burner on eBay, and buy a new one (faster as well) that works for like $20 or less. Or a DVD/CD-R for $50, Or a DVR-105 Superdrive for $100. I feel your sting tho, I lost support for my USB CD-R on my Rev A iMac with 10.2, bummer. Good machine for web surfing, and iTunes stuff, now it's just a web browser machine.

[Zoom]

This is already an upgraded CDR drive - 48x. I worked in 10.2, damn it. My question remains: why does Apple actively prevent these drives from working? They obviously work. Okay, so maybe Apple's test group didn't get to test every single model - that's okay. It's a brand name IDE drive, for God's sake. As least let the user have the option of trying to use it.