[ Thanks to Robert
McMillan for this link. ]
“Burning your own audio and data CDs used to be an expensive
proposition, but now that the cost of CD recorders and media has
plummeted to an all-time low, this technology is available to just
about every PC user.”
“Until recently, CD recording under Linux was an arduous
affair. CD-recording devices were not well-supported, and
burning a CD generally required a cryptic command-line interface
for anything more complicated than making a simple copy. If you
wanted to do things the easy way — with a nice drag-and-drop
mastering interface — Microsoft Windows was the only game in town.
But that’s all changed in the last year. Now there are some
useful and slick CD-recorder programs for both the GNOME and KDE
windowing environments.”
“If you don’t own a CD recorder already, the first thing you
want to do is buy the fastest and best-quality recorder that you
can afford. CD-R and CD-RW drives come in either SCSI (internal or
external) or IDE models and are capable of 2x, 4x, 6x, 8x, and now
12x recording speeds. Just to give you an idea of the reason for
the vast price differences among models of various speeds, an 8x
recorder can write a full 640 MB disc in approximately nine
minutes, a 4x in approximately 20 minutes, and a 2x in about 40.
Aside from write speed, one of the most important factors in
selecting a good recorder is the size of its read-ahead buffer
cache. Anything between 2 MB and 4 MB should greatly improve
performance and reduce the possibility of the dreaded “buffer
underrun.” This happens when the recorder uses up all the data
cached by the hard disk in your buffer and creates what is commonly
referred to as a “coastered” or unusable CD (“coastering” refers to
the art of turning a CD into a beer coaster via a technical
snafu).”