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A wise, not-so-old CD-R sage once told me, as I embarked on my first experiments in desktop recording back in the late-medieval days of January 1996, "CDRecordable is not a plug-and-play medium." Even working with the widely panned (in this magazine and others) Macintosh version of Incat's Easy CD Pro 2.0, Pioneer's short-lived (as a standalone, anyway) DW-S I 14X recorder, and a hardly-up-to-the-challenge Mac Performa 630CD with a turgid 2X CD-ROM drive and a badly cluttered hard drive with scarcely 40MB free, I was up and running relatively quickly. Sure, it took me a whole weekend to burn a disc I was really satisfied with, but we're talking about plugging and playing, not perfectionism...
Surprised at how quickly I had my SCSI conflicts resolved and my recorder ready to roll, my CD-R mentor shrugged it off, saying, "Well, who records on Macs anyway?" Developers, that's who. If there's one area where the Macintosh platform claims a larger market share than the otherwise-ubiquitous Wintel PC, it's in the developers' arena. And developers are a key user group for CD-R, given the obvious advantages of cranking out CD-ROMidentical one-offs on demand for prototyping, premastering, and shopping demo versions and treatments of their titles to publishers and wouldbe investors. It's a healthy market and a consistent one, especially for CD-R manufacturers who understand the mild irony that most Mac-based development is geared toward PC playback, and match their products and licensed software accordingly.
No CD recorder vendor has pursued the Macintosh market more vigorously or consistently than Optima Technology Corporation, with their Diskovery line of CD-R drives. The first two models, released in 1996 and 1997, were 2X write/4X read and 2X write/6X read bundles based on Sony drives. The 2X/6X package included an ingenious product of Optima's own authorship, CD-R Access Pro, which uses proprietary "data-boosting" technology to enable incremental, Finder-level copying of up to 1300MB of data to a CD-R disc. The data can then be read back at twice the drive's accredited speed (in other words, the entire 1.3GB of "boosted" data can be read back in the time it would take the drive to read a nonboosted 650MB disc), using the CD-R Access Pro reader.
The latest model, the CDWriter, takes it several...