Can the sort of CD-RW drive that you would buy at BestBuy copy store-bought CDs? If so, can someone recommend a reliable brand and relative price range? What are the pros and cons of an MP3-type player? The primary use (at least for now) is to allow a teenager to create their own music mixes. Looking for practical ease-of-use type issues, not concerned with copyright-type issues.
They most certainly will copy store bought cd’s. Some good brands are sony, creative, and zip. They range anywhere from $100 US and up, writing speed being the major factor. Internal drives are usually cheaper compared to an external with the same features. Hope this helps.
I think CD-Rs are better for this than CD-RWs. In my first attempts at burning a CD, I used CD-RWs, and was irritated to find that the CD-RW wouldn’t play in my car CD player.
Ah yes good point. CD-R (cd write once) and CD-RW (cd write many times) use different materials. Basically when you burn a CD, you are burning small dents or pits into the film. The film on a CD-RW needs to be rewritten over, so the film is softer compared to a disc that gets written once. This makes CD-RW harder to read, and I’ve had problems with them from my walkman, to car stereos. Usually a home cd player, which will have 3 beams instead of 1 will have no problem with them. I have a CD-RW, and I dont think I have ever rewritten a disc. Also blank cds are so cheap, I would say you are better off with CD-R.
Hope that made sense, I’m way to hungover today 
You can format CD-RWs to work with regular CD players, you just don’t get to put as much data on them.
CD-Rs seem much more cost effective and reliable.
Yes…mostly. A new CD type has recently been released to prevent copying. Presumably the CD’s are clearly marked and supposedly stores have to accept returns even if the CD packaging has been opened (for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here).
This has been done relatively quietly by the music industry and right now it’s a wait and see attitude to see how it takes and what problems might arise.
The above only refers to music. Software is another matter and much more difficult to say. Some you can, some you can’t and some you can only if you try really hard.
Plextor makes the best stuff but are a little pricey. Beyond that I really can’t say. I have an HP and it’s worked fine for me although it is limited (in some extremely geeky ways that probably wouldn’t affect someone just wanting to make music mixes). Prices should be around $200-350 depending on speed and software bundle mostly. Remember, it’s not only the CD-Writer it is also the copying software that makes it work and the software, if not bundled with the CD-Writer, will cost you extra (around $100 for Adaptec Easy CD Creator which is also limited in geeky ways but easy to use).
Visit some websites to find reviews on a few products you might consider.
It depends on the MP3 player you are talking about. Some are CD players that accept MP3’s burned to a CD. Some just have the MP3’s downloaded into memory. In all they come in widely varying abilities and prices. They vary all over the board in term of battery life, number of songs held in memory, quality, display options, options to categorize music, etc…
MP3’s basically are much smaller file sizes than what is found on a CD although the quality of an MP3 is usually less than that found on a CD.
Good luck.
Thanks for the help so far, here’s another stupid follow up question. How do you actually create the mix disc? I wouldn’t think that if I plopped my well-worn copy of Born to Run into my computer that it would give me a nice file for each song. Armed with just your average CD-ROM home computer, internet access, and the CD-W that I buy from Best Buy, how do I make the mix disc?
Sorry for the simplistic sounding questions but I’ve fallen completely behind the curve when it comes to music file sharing, etc.
And also (speaking of dumb questions), why do you call it a “CD-R”? Isn’t R for read and W for write? If it only writes once, why CD-R instead of CD-W?
CD-R = CD-Recordable
CD-RW = CD-ReWriteable
But don’t ask me why.
CD-R is for Recordable.
CD-RW is for Re-Writable.
You need software that can do this. It’s called ‘ripping’. Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4 can do this as well as a bunch of other software (most of which you have to buy but some CD-R and CD-RW will come with the necessary software).
To create a mix CD you ‘rip’ each song you want off of your various CD’s. For a full CD this will require around 650MB of free disk space to accomplish (depending on how full you want your mix disk to be). Once you have a pile of songs you simply run you burning software, order the songs the way you like them and hit go.
What if you just want to back up data? I presume, in this case, you’d get a CD-RW, is that correct? Or do the RW disks corrupt data also? If that’s all you want to do should you still buy an expensive one or are the cheapies ok?
You can do exactly that with most of the various MP3-ripping programs available (MusicMatch is popular and full-featured, and the one I use, CDEx is free but not as user-friendly)–pop in an audio CD, and the software will automatically log on to a CDDB-format database, download the album info (artist, track titles, etc.), and convert the CD tracks to MP3 with customizable filenames matching the downloaded info. It takes about 10 minutes to “rip” an average-length CD.
I second what World Eater said: CD-RW will not function in most existing audio CD players, and in my experience the discs are much less reliable (and more expensive) than CD-Rs. CD-RWs are practically obsolete.
Max Harvey and others have sort of addressed this.
I have a CD-RW and never re-writable disks. I’ve played with them and found them to be a bit flaky. Considering they are about 10x more expensive than a regular CD-R disk you may as well just use CD-R’s…you can ruin a lot of them before losing money on the deal.
In addition, data CD’s can be written to multiple times. You can’t erase or overwrite what is already on them but you can keep adding to them over time. You can even setup your CD-R drive to act like a regular disk drive. Instead of having to fire up specialized software and collect your data for burning you can have a CD in and just save to it (or copy to it or whatever) as you would do with a floppy drive.
I recently got a portable CD player that plays the CD-RW format. It’s pretty neat. 
To answer the OP, yes, the software that comes with most CD-RW recorders will copy Data, Audio and Mixed Mode CDs.
Keep in mind that a CD-RW drive will still be able to write to CD-R media. And CD-RW media isn’t completely useless - I use CD-RWs for my Rio Volt (most MP3 CD players will read CD-RW discs). I copy a bunch of songs, then when I get tired of them, I erase the disc and copy some more.
cdrs are practically free these days after rebate so I haven’t got any cdrws yet. One thing I haven’t been able to resolve is that Windows & PC’s can copy copyprotected stuff & I thought machines that can copy are illegal.
Say, I asked about Music cdrs (special cds you use just for writing music) & Data cdrs & someone told me here that Music cds cost more cause they have a small fee tacked on for song use. But at our store, music cdrs are actually cheaper than data cds.
To add to the CD-RW vs. CD-R discussion, I just use the CD-Rs. The RWs take so long to write to, they’re much more expensive, and they’re flaky. For instance, I have a TDK burner, and it will only recognize TDK CD-RWs. CD-Rs are so cheap that I just use those for backups.
Most name-brand CD burners will include ripping software, but if you get one that doesn’t, there are a number of free utilities available for download.
I have another PC with a no-name burner in it, and I use Audiograbber. The only catch is that, since it’s a free version, it randomly selects half the songs on a CD. Sometimes you have to close then open the program several times before you get all the songs, or the ones you want.