According to their newsletter, Roxio, the software arm of Adaptec, has decided not to release another update to DirectCD/Mac anytime soon. DirectCD allows your CD-R drive to appear just like any other drive volume.
In the past, Roxio said they were working on a new version of DirectCD that would fix some minor bugs and add support for new drives. And, in fact, they did build a new version, and submitted it to beta testers.
“During testing we uncovered many problems that caused DCD, Toast, and/or the Mac OS to crash, sometimes with loss of data,” Victor Nemechek, Roxio’s Macintosh Software product manager writes in the newsletter.
“These problems are difficult to diagnose and fix because of the many variables involved. Every combination of Mac OS version, Toast version, DCD version, CD Recorder firmware version, FireWire or USB bridge firmware version, and UDF version caused different sporadic problems that are virtually impossible to diagnose and solve. We at Roxio do not feel comfortable releasing a product that we know has a fairly high probability of crashing your system and possibly corrupting your data.”
He said they’ll continue working on these problems, but that he doesn’t anticipate a resolution in the near future. On a more positive note, he said that Roxio plans on starting development of DirectCD for Mac OS X later this year. (Thanks to MacCentral reader Martin Totusek for the heads-up on this item.)