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21 responses total.

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I hope it goes well.  You can email with questions if you want.

Your best bet is to use two CD-ROMs. One for everyday read-only use, and a
r/w drive for making CDs. Otherwise, your r/w drive may suffer the same fate
as your current CD-ROM and become clogged with dust, which won't be good
unless you want a lot of nice, shiny 5" coasters for your tables. 
I work in a repair shop, and have resurrected more than a few aparrently dead
CD-ROMs by opening them up and giving them a good cleaning. Also, keep a can
of air around for dusting out the r/w drive's tray and cleaning any dust off
the CD before making a disc.
Audio CD's are easy, just as long as your HDD can keep up with the CD. Also
note that the original wavs take a lot of space, roughly 10MB/min at 44KHz
16-bit stereo. Most programs won't let you make an audio CD with wavs of lower
quality than that.
Also, by using your read-only CD-ROM, you can do direct CD-to-CD copies.
Useful for making "throwaway" copies of important CDs. 

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Make sure that you close the session when you burn a disc. (I found this
out the hard way.) Most older CD-ROMs have problems with multi-session discs.
Newer ones and CD-R/Ws can read them fine. Making a multi-session disc means
that you can add more data to a CDR that you've written to already. You might
be able to read a multi-session disc after you've closed the final session
on your older CD-ROM. 
You can only burn to an audio CD once. You shouldn't have any problems reading
them in anything but the oldest CD players.

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I think the "Close Session" option is somewhere in the settings menu, where
you choose what format you're recording in (CD-ROM, CD-XA, etc). I'll look
later on when I dump some of my oversized directories to CD tonight.
I'm beginning to seriously look into getting a bigger HDD. Anyone seen any
good deals on >8GB drives? 

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What a pain!

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The laser might be getting weak in you Discman.

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Usually it's a good idea to test your CDR/W drive at lower speeds before
trying to max it out. You probably had some buffer underruns that caused the
static in your audio CDs. 2x is probably the best speed that you can burn
reliably at with a Dx4/100. You'll need a faster PC (K6-200+, P200+) to burn
at higher speeds reliably. Other factors are bus speed (Dx4/100 runs at 25MHz,
a K6/Pentium usually runs 66MHz or higher), HDD speed (you can buffer a CD
to your HDD first), and memory (amount: 32MB+, speed: <=60ns). YMMV.

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I must've been thinking about my friend's machine. He's got a Dx4/100 w/32MB
of RAM.

Were you doing other stuff on the machine while you were burning the CD?
Sounds like the computer was not able to keep up with the demands from the
CD burner.  (Screen saver came on?)

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Well, it's been a couple of years since anything was posted to this, and I
have questions tangentially related, so I thought I'd put them here rather
than starting a new item.

I've just gotten a CD-R/W drive.  It's mostly working fine.  But as I've
looked at the media, I'm kind of curious.  I hadn't previously realized
that there were different CD-R/W disks, rated for different speeds.
(Ditto for CD-R disks.)  I presume that if you try to exceed the nominal
rating you're greatly increasing your chances of errors.  Is this a difference
of quality in essentially similar disks, or is there an actual difference in
what they're made of & how they're made?

I guess I'm also curious about the difference in the media between CD-R &
CD-R/W.  But again, all this is just random curiosity - except that I wish
I'd noticed a bit earlier that some disks I got weren't quite the bargain I
thought they were.

In general0 you want to buy CD media rated as fast as you are planning to burn
them.  You can still use 2x media in a faster burner as long as you set the
writing speed to 2x, for instance.  These days it's hard to find anything
cheaper than 8x, and I've seen sales on 12x media by new companies looking
to get name recognition.

CD-Rs work by using the laser to shoot holes in one of the layers.  CD-RWs
work by heating up a region (with the laser) and then using magnetic fields
to manipulate a layer in that region (MiniDiscs work this way).

As far as I've been able to tell, CD-Rs are all pretty much the same quality.
Ask me again in 10 years and I might have more data on longevity.

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