I haven't heard or experienced any problems using DVD re-writers recording audio CDs. Note that Wavelab 5 has just been announced that has extensive support for all manner of DVD and CD burning. At the end of the day though, what you decide depends on what your needs are. If like me you would only be using DVD burners for backup and imaging it might be a good idea to wait a little longer. Not only are dual layer DVD burners about to hit the market (and their price will quickly fall) that burn double the current DVD burners, but also there are blue ray drives being readied for the market now by a number of manufacturers. These are capable of burning 27 Gig of data and they are on the market in Japan now. But it gets better. Pioneer have announced that they are working on a blue ray burner that is capable of burning up to 50 Gigs on a single disk. Now that's serious back-up media!

I disagree kinetic.

As cheap as DVD burners are now, its a hell of a lot smarter than buying another CD burner, even if it _is_ outdated in a year. And its not worth waiting, if cprieb has needs to be met now.

I say go for it. I haven't heard of any DVD owners having problems specifically with CD burning. And they're under $100 now. The cheapest CD Burners you'll find will be around $50. No contest.

Thank you kinetic and mjones. Both of you helped me to clear my doubts about compatibility, which was my main question.

Kinetic, I know what you mean about dying technologies (and I have some pieces of hardware under my bed to prove it). But, since I'm in a hurry, I tend to agree with mjones. Furthermore I'm affraid that CD burners will be outdated first.

Thank you guys

César

I have a Panasonic DVD multidrive, setup to burn CD-R+RW as well as DVD's. They cost a little more, but at least you know it's set up to handle multiple tasks. I got it primarily to backup session data, but also as a backup burner when my primary burner goes down. Anyone know if a burner will operate via firewire connection? If you have a port, you could mount a CD burner in an external FW case and have two burners that way.

I do that all the time. I have a 52x internal CDRW, and a 48X external firewire CDRW, and both are able to burn at full rated speed, simultaneously!!! I can churn out 100 CDs in under two hours, for a fraction of the cost of a CD tower.

Thanks Mark, guess I'll have to go buy another CDRW. I have firewire set up for flying tracks from hard drive into DAW for Sonar, no reason not to use the FW case to pick up the burning pace as well.

The Only thing I would say is, be careful if the tracks you're burning also reside on the firewire hard drive. In that scenario, the hard drive and the burner might bump heads. It'll still work as long as the burner has buffer underrun protection (which virtually all of them do) but it will slow the burner down significantly.

The optimal setup is to have all the drives used in the burning process on different buses. In other words, use an internal HDD to host the files to be burned, and make sure the internal burner is on the other IDE channel.

And also make sure your preferred software can simultaneously handle two drives. I'm on a Mac using Toast, and although it doesn't 'officially' support burning to multiple drives simultaneously, the workaround is to make a copy of the app itself, open both, point one copy of Toast at one burner, and the other copy at the other burner.