CD Burning: What Route Should I Go?

If you add an external CD burner to your Mac, I think you'd want one that uses the firewire protocol rather than USB. Firewire is native to Macs.

Also, you should get better results copying the CD to the hard drive rather than duping straight from a CD reader to the CD burner.

you shouldn't see any quality differencr b/t a computer burner and a stand alone.

a problem w/ stand alone is that you need to use "audio" cdrs. these have a tiny bit of information on them that stand alone burners need to see in order to burn to the disc. audio cdrs are more expensive because they're taxed. this was the RIAAs attempt to get money for blank cdrs because they figure you will be copying commercially released cds (as oppesed to buying them) on stand alone burners. buying a PC burner will get around this.

pc burners are very reliable, at least from my experience. i have an HP cd writer, its about 4 years old, and it has burned about 3-4K+ cdrs and keeps on going. it was expensive back then, but they all were back then. it is still equivalent to todays burners save for the speed, but you dont want to burn audio at over 8X anyhow!

i have found that disc to disc copying introduces all kinds of artifacts. the only way to go is to transfer to hard drive first using EAC (exact audio copy) and burn from there. you will never have a problem... i havn't yet!

also, use quality cdrs. mitsui are usually considered the best, but they are pricey. Taiyo Yuden are fairly priced and are outstanding in quality. all the other cdrs people always recommend (such as TDK, sony, maxell) have all been made by different manufacturers of varying quality. they switch their supplier all the time. you can't expect any one manufacturer if you buy these brands anymore.

there is a wealth of information on the internet about cdrs, burners, audio extraction, and burning. here's a good place to get your feet wet. check out as many live music trading sites as you can... include that in your searches. we have a tendency to be very anal about quality and have found the best ways to produce perfect clones :)

http://www.etree.org/faq_cdr.html

good luck!

Thanks, guys. I have a G3 Mac and it doesn't have Firewire. Considering the cost involved in putting in Firewire card and getting an external burner, I guess it makes the most sense to just buy another computer, such as the Emac for $799 (though I'm not crazy about the all-in-one monitor thing). There is some divergence in opinion here about sonics, but most of you seem to think putting on the hard drive & then burning gives best results.

I had considered buying a Windows computer, as you get so much more software and processing power for less money than Mac, but with the vulnerability of Windows, I almost think one is better off with Apple, as it is pretty much immune to the viruses and hacking that plague Bill Gates' ill-conceived creations.

Where can you get Mitsui's at a fair price, rather than paying through the nose for them at the few audio dealers or high-priced boutiques that carry them?

To give you good advice about your options with your current Mac we'd need to know which model it is, or at least a couple of things about it. Does it have SCSI or USB as its input port, or ports? And is it a model that will accept a PCI card, so that you could add USB or Firewire?

1998 was the first year for the iMac and, if that is what you have, you can get an external USB CD burner, as was suggested above, along with software like Roxio's Toast, and you're in business. The big advantage of using both the internal CD player and an external burner along with Toast is that it's a one step operation, drag the image of the audio CD onto Toast, rearrange the order of the tracks by dragging if you want, and burn directly from the original to the copy in one step, rather than copying to the hard drive and then to the burner.

If you have a different desktop Mac, not an iMac, that instead of USB has a SCSI port, it's possible to buy a SCSI external burner but they might be hard to find and would be more expensive than a USB burner. A better alternative for one of those machines would probably be to buy a combination USB/Firewire PCI card and get an external USB or Firewire drive, as described above.

I haven't found it to be true that an external drive requires 'audio' grade blank CD's. I've got a bulletproof SCSI external burner built by APS that will write perfect CD's on absolutely any brand or grade of media, even the no-name stuff from an office supply warehouse.

Here's my two cents.

1. Get a new computer with a built-in cd burner.

2. Get the Freeware (yes it's free) EXACT audio copy on the internet.

There are major high-end audio manufacturers who use this method over anything else for compilation demos at CES and in-house for their own use, even above stand-alone ''professionnal'' audio burners.

This freeware is a bit complicated, but when you have learned all of it's parameters and possibilities, you can tailor the sound and actually remove some of cd's inherent faults with this incredible software. And best of all, it's free.