All CD recorders are not created the same. Considering the big price differences between the various units available, the fact that the quality varies shouldn't surprise anyone. While it's not always true that you get what you pay for, some smart shopping is definitely in order when dealing with PC CD-R.

There are a couple of performance features that help narrow down the marketplace some. The most important thing to know is that you can write a CD in two ways: track-at-once (TAO) and disc-at-once (DAO). In TAO mode, each track of the CD is laid down in a separate session. The result is that some garbage is left behind in between each track. That garbage does two things. First, it can cause pops or clicks on some players when they read over that section. Second, on any player, it causes a two second gap to appear between tracks. This means you can't have music running continuously; at the end of every track, there's a pause whether you want one or not. For both these reasons, only DAO mode is recommended for making audio CDs. Just about every CD-R or CD-RW on the market supports DAO, with one notable exception: Sony. In an attempt to thwart audio piracy, Sony was at one point releasing their CD burners without DAO mode available. Even though they appear to have relaxed that policy, I find Sony's attitude so counter-productive to CD audio recording that I avoid their drives regardless of their capabilities. Some like to praise their exclusive recording recovery mechanism, that allows a failed burn to be completed when other recorders would have given up. From my perspective, failed burns are so incredibly rare that this is of negligible value.

Whether a drive supports just CD-R or also includes CD-RW doesn't matter for audio purposes. Most of the applications that make rewritable CDs useful, like packet writing and DirectCD, are of no value for making audio discs. I don't really trust any of the software on the market that performs rewritable tricks anyway; the technology doesn't seem mature enough to make for a reliable backup by my standards. The sole reason you might want a CD-RW drive for audio is that you can use a single rewritable blank over and over for testing your recording efforts. This cuts down on media waste a bit, but the cost savings are minimal when you consider how cheap regular old CD-R blanks are nowadays.

My current favorite CD recorder is the Panasonic 7502. You might also see this referred to as a Matsushita drive, that's the parent company of Panasonic. While not available retail, the 7502 is a popular unit for OEM bundling from a variety of sources, and the cost is under $250 for a SCSI unit. There's also an IDE version available that I'm told is good, but I haven't tested it myself. The recorder is mechanically sturdy, reliable, and writes at 4X.

Two companies offer more pricey recorders that many find well worth the extra cash. Yamaha has been making high-quality recorders for quite some time, and they used to be the only serious choice available. If you're concerned about support for problems with your drive, Yamaha offers the most manufacturer help available from anyone via monitoring the Adaptec CD-R mailing list. The other premium manufacturer to watch is Plextor. As the next section details, Plextor is the only real choice for an audio CD-ROM unit, and their recorders are of similarly high quality and reliability. Also, using both a Plextor CD-ROM and CD-R enables a special disc copying mode that no other manufacturer offers. The Panasonic drives are a great choice for the person on a budget who is willing to deal with problems that arise on their own. If instead you want life to be easier and are willing to pay for that, Yamaha or Plextor are better choices.

As for the rest of the manufacturers, I don't see any reason to recommend any of their drives. Ricoh's 6200 and 6201 recorders were a popular choice at one point, but at this time I don't see any reason to buy a recorder that only runs at 2X when the 4X Panasonic units are just as cheap. The widely available HP recorder kits have been fraught with problems in the past, and HP is just re-branding someone else's low quality drive in their bundle. I don't really recommend them, but if you have to buy something from the retail channel, they're probably the best choice. Smart and Friendly is another company that just bundles other manufacturer's products. They seem to do an excellent job of only including the best products available, though, and the bundles are usually integrated better than most other sources. If you're looking for a whole package with a minimum of fuss, they offer a decent option in that regard.

Working with CD audio isn't like working with data discs. It's a trivial operation to read a sector of data off a computer CD and copy it onto another. Things are not quite so simple when it comes to audio.

The process behind converting CD audio to a format your computer can manipulate is called Digital Audio Extraction (DAE). This is also referred to as audio ripping in some circles. The unfortunate problem with DAE is that some CD-ROM drives don't do a very good job of it. The extracted audio contains pops, clicks, or noise. In particularly bad cases, you can get totally unusable audio because of these artifacts.

In addition to these concerns, another problem is working against you. When asked to extract a very specific part of an audio disc, many computer CD-ROM drives don't seek to exactly the right point. They'll retrieve audio close to what you wanted, but not necessarily exact. This phenomenon has been denoted DAE "jitter." This is unrelated to the term jitter as it's used in high-end audio usage, where it refers to subtle problems in the CD clocking mechanism.

Between the noise and jitter, the actual DAE performance of a random drive is unpredictable. Some CD-ROM units that are perfectly good for data use are practically useless for audio extraction. For example, many of the popular models from Toshiba and NEC have extremely poor DAE results, often only working at less than 1X regular speed if at all. Your run-of-the-mill inexpensive IDE CD-ROM is probably going to give you poor results when used for DAE. There are some exceptions. The drives from Panasonic seem to have superior audio capabilities compared with their similarly priced competition, for example.

So if you try to extract audio from a CD, and it's filled with unpleasant audio artifacts, it's quite likely your choice of source CD-ROM is to blame. You may find that DAE works more reliably if you use an available CD recorder for DAE instead. This prevents straightforward copying from one unit to another, but as we'll address later that's rarely a good move for audio anyway.

Now, if you want this problem to just go away, there's only once choice: Plextor. The CD-ROM and CD-R units from Plextor have been engineering to extract digital audio reliably and repeatably, every time. "Bit for bit accurate" is the marketing catch phrase they like to use. Anyone who uses a Plextor drive for audio CD-R is immediately hooked and won't buy anything else. One drawback for some is that all their units are only available as SCSI drives. I personally feel that the advantages of a Plextor drive are so compelling that they force anyone who wants high-quality audio CD-R to use SCSI in their system. If you just want to run off data CDs or the occasional audio disc without being too concerned about quality, you'll get by just fine with a regular IDE system. But for professional grade audio copying and recording, nothing but a Plextor CD-ROM will do.

Having made a case for SCSI above, the obvious question becomes what SCSI card to use. A number of companies make SCSI hardware. The only one I recommend for most purpose is Adaptec. While a case can easily be made their SCSI products are overpriced compared with similar units from Advansys, Buslogic, or others, the fact that Adaptec has such a large market share means that support for their SCSI cards dwarves any other manufacturer. I'd love to save a few bucks and get something cheaper, but I always regret it when I try.

Since most PC CD recorders are going in systems that support PCI cards, I generally recommend one of the variants on the Adaptec 2940 card. This is available in versions that support Ultra SCSI and Wide SCSI, with modest price premiums. I'd recommend getting Ultra SCSI support, as even the current Plextor CD-ROM units work best with that protocol. The availability of Wide SCSI is only necessary for the more advanced SCSI enthusiast; if you don't know that you need it already, you probably don't. But if the price difference doesn't make a big difference to you, going whole-hog and getting the 2940UW isn't a bad idea. Recently cards based on Adaptec's Ultra2 chipset have hit the market. At the moment these have slightly worse software support than the older cards, but those problems have been getting ironed out very quickly.

There are some less expensive options you might consider. Adaptec's 2910 board makes a good choice if you're just putting your CD-ROM or recorder on the SCSI bus. I'd steer away from their 2920 unit, as I never hear anything good about them.

If you know enough to argue in depth for using a product from another manufacturer, you probably know enough to get good results even with other products. If SCSI is something you're considering only because it makes for the best CD-R setups, I suggest Adaptec makes the board you want.

At first glance, it seems you can create audio CDs just by copying tracks from one CD to another. While it's possible to get reasonable results that way, in practice that's the wrong approach.

If you recall that making seamless audio CDs requires the use of DAO mode, you'll conclude that prohibits making compilations from multiple discs. You'd have to interrupt the writing stream to switch source material, and that ruins a DAO disc. But even if you're copying tracks from a single CD, a direct copy still isn't necessarily the right move. Any problems with tracking or reading your source material will result in a ruined disc. And you can run into quality control concerns in the sound of the result that aren't obvious until you play the completed disc all the way through, which is time consuming.

The best way to make audio CDs is to use DAE to write all the tracks to your hard drive (a bit less than 800MB for a 74 minute disc), then burn the CD-R directly from those files. On a PC, DAE will usually result in a WAV file formatted correctly (16 bits, stereo, 44.1Khz) for recording. As far as CD recording software is concerned, anything in that format is CD audio; the conversion to the CD-DA specification used to write CDs happens automatically in both directions.

I've left out an important detail from the previous sections. Even if you've got the best CD-ROM drive available and know enough to want all your audio on your hard drive before burning, I haven't mentioned what software actually performs DAE to pull all this off. And that's a very important detail.

If you have a Plextor drive, all the software you need is included with the drive. Their Plextor Manager program includes a section for Audio Capture. The interface is spartan but perfectly usable. You select a single track, click on the Capture button, and pick where to write the resulting file to. A progress bar will pop up showing how fast the drive is extracting audio. This is very important to watch. Most of the problems that can result in poor quality extraction, like dirt or scratches on the CD, will show up as slowdowns in the DAE process. If the drive is cruising away at 2000Kb/s, and you see it drop to 500Kb/s for a second, you can be sure that was a defect it just tracked over. Any track that exhibits that symptom should be checked carefully before recording to make sure there's no sonic artifact associated with the defect.

One of the great things about the Plextor Manager software is that you can slow the drive down as necessary when it has trouble tracking at the higher speeds. Even the fastest unit can be forced to DAE at plain old single speed rates. If you can't get a clean read at one speed, drop to a slower one and try again. Some really nasty sources won't track cleanly at any speed, but that's life.

Watching for problems by monitoring the read speed requires you to be sitting at your computer while the audio is extracting. The Plextor Audio Capture software requires that, anyway, because it will only do one track at a time. One helpful thing to speed this process is noting that the audio capture actually spawns off a somewhat independent second window for the extraction. You can move this out of the way and select the following track, getting ready for the next extraction, and move the mouse over the Capture button. That way, as soon as the extraction progress window closes, you can click and immediately start the next track.

One little aberration to be concerned about involves spin-up. When you take a CD-ROM from a dead stop to rotation to start reading, it's not quite as reliable a source while spinning up. This can result in the usual artifacts (clicks, pops, etc) during that period. As a bit of paranoia, I always start extracting the first track, wait until the drive spins up, then cancel the read and start it again quickly before the drive stops spinning.

Be sure you're using the latest version of the Plextor Manager software, especially if you have one of their newer drives. The company is notorious for shipping outdated, buggy releases on the diskettes or CDs included in the drive package. Generally you have to install them anyway, then get an update from their home page. Later versions of PM include support for AudioFS, which seemingly allows dragging audio tracks around easily in a fashion that you can copy a batch at once. This does not use the some high-quality extraction mechanism Plextor Audio Capture uses, so I don't recommend it.

Many are interesting in audio CD-R because they want to preserve precious analog recordings. LPs, cassette tape, even 8-tracks can all be converted to digital form with minimal or no loss in fidelity. But it's not necessarily a simple process.

Let's start with cassettes and other such sources with a direct audio output (this includes just about any audio mechanism other than LP records). Presumably you have a sound card, which is the way you convert these analog sources to digital format easily. Your source probably has two RCA jacks that you use to connect it to your stereo. Meanwhile, your sound card has a little headphone jack. The first thing you need is a cable that converts from the RCA jacks to the headphone mini-jack. You can get one of these easily at a store like Radio Shack. Plug the cable into the line input (not the microphone input) of your sound card, plug the other end into your source, and your source is connected.

You should start playing the source and make sure you can hear the audio out coming out of your computer. If you hear nothing, check the mixer/volume control application on your computer to make sure that input is enabled and turned up enough to hear. The mixer is also a good place to disable all other sound card inputs before you start recording. The microphone input in particular can pick up noise that degrades the overall sound quality of the recording you make, so muting that one can be helpful in improving overall fidelity. If you still get nothing, check all your connection and try connecting other items to systematically determine which part is to blame for the problem.

If you've using a record as your source, things are more complicated. The output from a phonograph needle and cartridge is special in two ways. First, it involves considerably less voltage than any other source you're likely to use. This mandates some sort of preamplifier to increase the level enough that your sound card can digitize the sound cleanly. Second, records are equalized to get around some problems with that format's high-frequency response. This is called RIAA equalization. In order to get the correct sound off a record, you need to reverse the equalization process done during mastering.

The usual way to handle both these problems, the level mismatch and the equalization, is to use a phono preamp. Many places offer stand-along units that convert a phonograph turntable output to something suitable for connecting to your computer. Usually the easiest way to handle this process is to find a preamp or receiver with a phono input on it, connect the turntable to that, then use the tape output to drive the sound card with. While it's theoretically possible to amplify the LP output some other way, and correct the RIAA equalization in software, that's likely to give inferior results to using a proper phono stage in the first place.

If you've followed this far, you may have noted I haven't discussed the role the computer plays in this process. The only part of your sound card exercised when you're inputting audio from an external source is its analog/digital converter (ADC). Since the A/D converter doesn't get used by most people, most sound cards have a really poor quality implementation of that function. Even the popular and expensive SoundBlaster cards from Creative Labs don't do a particularly good job in that regard, and the circuits in your typical no-name clone sound card are awful. For most people, I recommend cards based on the Ensoniq PCI chipset. Creative themselves now sells a card like that themselves that's very inexpensive (under $50), and it's possible to get an OEM version for closer to $30. At the higher end of the market, Turtle Beach sells excellent hardware for audio conversion. Unfortunately, the software support that comes with these boards is spotty and often incomplete, especially for less popular operating systems like Windows NT.

At the really high end, it's possible to use an external A/D converter and utilize a digital input to your computer. A digital input card is pretty much required if you want to make CDs from sources like DAT without losing sound quality. DAT may be problematic in any case, because many of these tapes are recorded at 48KHz instead of the CD standard 44.1KHz, requiring what's called sample rate conversion.

Regardless of how an analog sound source is hooked to your computer, one thing to watch carefully is what input level you're digitizing at. The best quality digital conversions happen when the audio is at the highest possible level the sound card can convert without distortion, but if you exceed that louder portions will get clipped off and cause audible problems during playback. You should find an audio input program that lets you monitor how close you are to exceeding the capabilities of the sound card's input level so you can optimize to the highest level possible without distortion. Keep turning the slider for the line input up until you see it exceed what the computer can handle, then back off a bit. This is similar to the way you can adjust the input level on a tape deck to make the best recordings on that format.

The previous section should have left you wondering just how exactly you should go about monitoring whether the sound you're recording is so loud that's distorting. The answer is that you need some smart software that lets you see what's happening as you input analog audio. In addition, you'll eventually want to edit the sound you record in some ways, so that's an important capability to have.

I personally don't bother editing out problems with my source material. If my records are clean and I use a good turntable, the pops and hiss are minimized. But if you want to use software to make as pristine a recording as possible, a number of possibilities are available.

None of this care taken in preparing a clean source is going to help if you don't record the result properly. CD-R software as a category has matured considerably over the past few years, and as a result most packages on the market will work just fine for a typical recording job.

I've mentioned Adaptec Easy-CD Creator a number of times above, and that's because I find it the easiest general-purpose package to use. Using a Windows Explorer-style interface, you can create discs very quickly and easily, whether it's audio or data you're recording. The audio capabilities of the program are limited to making straightforward recordings on discs of normal capacity. One annoying concern is that the settings that enable DAO mode aren't saved anywhere. You have to make sure you select that option every time you hit the record button.

A number of other general-purpose programs offer more advanced features, but that's invariably at the expensive extra complexity even for making simple discs. Examples include Goldenhawk and Nero.

Professional audio editing software like SoundForge often includes a CD-R recording facility. One of the advantages of these programs is that they add support for audio CD features like adding indexes in the middle of a track.

While this discussion is generally PC-centric, I'll also add a note for Mac users. Toast is the Adaptec package comparable to Easy CD Creator for that platform, including broad options. But Toast does not support any DAO capabilities. You'll have to upgrade to the considerably more expensive Jam software for that.

Modern PCs do lots of things at once. On a typical day I'll have a web browser downloading something in the background, the CD player app will be playing music, and I'll be typing into telnet and Word windows. Older recording software wouldn't work very well in that sort of environment. In order for a CD recorder to function, it needs a continuous stream of data to write. If that data gets interrupted for too long, a condition called a buffer underrun will occur. You CD-R will be corrupted and rendered useless.

While the current generation of burners and burning software minimizes this problem, there are still a couple of things you should watch out for.

Microsoft Office installs a program called Fast Find by default. Periodically, this re-indexes files on your hard drive in a very intensive fashion. You should either disable the program from starting in the first place (my recommendation unless you actively use Fast Find) or kill that process before starting a burn.

Your CD recorder won't do you much good without blank media to write on. Not all media is created equal. There are three basic types of CD-R formulations, generally referred to by color. Green/gold, gold, and blue/silver are the main ones you'll see. Green media is commonly available from companies like TDK and Sony. Mitsui invented the gold formulation, and licenses it to companies like Kodak (they add an extra layer of protection on the top layer of the disc). Blue and silver blanks appear from Verbatim and others.

Which is best? There's no clear answer. Different combinations of media, recorder, and player will give essentially random results. You may find that the media that works perfectly with your recorder and CD player won't work in your friend's car stereo. Similarly, evaluations of media from someone with a different recorder than yourself are of little value. You should start with the media the manufacturer recommends and get samples of each. Record some audio and test them out on the CD players you have access to. Use regular stereos, car stereos, portable units, CD-ROM drives in computers, anything you think of.

I personally find Mitsui Gold media to be best for my purposes. But guess what? They just changed their formulation a bit recently. I can't say for sure that the next batch of discs I buy will work as well as the ones I've been getting before. If you buy media from someone who doesn't manufacture it themselves, like HP, you have no idea what you'll find inside. Big resellers change media sources regularly, without warning or notification. Just because the box looks the same as the last time you bought it, that doesn't mean the media inside is the same.

I keep a "control" box of media around. These are blanks that I know work flawlessly with my recorder, based on extensive testing. If I start running into recording QC problems, I try switching back to that known media before I assume there's a problem with the recorder. Given how cheap CD blanks are now, it's worth taking some time to try a variety from multiple sources to see what works for you. I myself spend a bit more to get high-quality stuff like Mitsui or Kodak and avoid Maxell, Sony, and any off-brands you'll find (typically with rebates giving a deep discount). But these others may work just fine for you.

Even if you do everything right and make the "perfect" audio disc, you need to have reasonable expectations about its compatibility. There are always going to be players out there that have trouble reading CD-R discs, no matter how well constructed. For example, most home (non-computer) DVD players on the market right now won't read CD-R (Sony units being one exception). The formulation used in CD-RW media won't read on many playback mechanisms, whether they're in a CD- ROM or regular CD player.

If you try enough playback examples, you'll find nobody makes a CD-R that plays perfectly everywhere. Even pressed aluminum discs you buy in the store don't always work everywhere. Recently, for example, Warner Bros released some recordings that won't play on many Philips based CD players.

Walking into audio CD-R expecting universal compatibility guarantees you'll be disappointed. But if you're willing to experiment with media to find a combination that works well, and you patiently construct a system that's reliable, you should find yourself making audio CDs that are enjoyable almost anywhere.

Some people will tell you that the latest hardware is needed for strenuous CD-R work. In reality, even a medium powered 486 system is more than sufficient for CD writing duty. I'd recommend at least a Pentium 100 with 32MB of RAM and a big hard drive for storing your audio data on (you'll chew through gigabytes easily, trust me). But if you follow the rest of the advice here, even a low powered system should work just fine. Faster computers are quite helpful if you'll be editing audio, which is more difficult than almost anything else you can do on a computer.

Older hard drive units used to pause periodically to do what's called thermal recalibration. They would take a break and not spit out any data for a little bit as they adjusted themselves. With today's software and CD recording hardware buffering, even a fairly long recalibration pause shouldn't effect your recording. Hard drives with an audio/video (AV) rating are nice in that they tend to have better caching and overall performance, but you certainly shouldn't feel you need such a beast just to write CDs with. Even a bargain basement IDE hard drive is more than sufficient for most jobs. What is nice about the better quality hard drives is that they allow faster editing and processing of big audio files.

Consumer home CD recorders take special blanks that are encoded for writing audio. These typically cost considerably more than the media that feeds a computer CD-R, because the audio-specific products include a recording industry tariff. The only difference between the two is a code written on the CD that says which type of disc you're dealing with. Standalone CD recorders check that code before they'll allow a write to the disc.

There are a couple of ways around this. It's possible with some recorders to put a real audio blank in, press the record button (the point at which it checks for the code), then manually pull out the disc tray (being careful not to strip the gears inside). You can put the computer blank in, carefully push the mechanism back in, and start recording audio. An alternate solution adds a switch to the player that allows you to pull this off more easily. Searching the Internet should locate a number of suggestions about how to pull off this process.