So what's a good cd burner to get ... ??

Thanks !! I've used IngBurn before and it worked great for me....my new Plextor should be here if not today, sometime this week.

Well, my Plextor cd burner arrived today. It came with Roxio Creator 10, not Nero....which is good...The Ceator 10 program works great for recording cd's, no upgrade necessary...

The Plextor loads up quicker than my other cd-rom. The Plex Utilities is a version 1.2 but it atomatically finds an upgrade to 1.3, so I've got the newest version avaiable now.

I tried burning a couple of cd's...one with 3 wav files on it, and another with Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, because it's one 45 minute long song....everything sounds great...I did a bler test on it and found 1 error.

The TY cd's worked perfectly.

It's been a very good day. Thanks for all the suggestions !!!!

I tried burning a couple of cd's...one with 3 wav files on it, and another with Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, because it's one 45 minute long song....everything sounds great...I did a bler test on it and found 1 error.

Actually that's not so good. The error test should either find 1000 - 3000 errors on a 45 minute CD or none at all, depending upon what mode it is working in. Did it tell you what sort of error it found?

James.

I think it was a sampling error. I listented to the whole 45 minutes of Jethro Tull...and it didn't miss a note. Not one skip, nothing I could hear. The Creator 10 software worked like a champ, and burned my test cd's in a very short period of time. I'm very happy with it. I did the Bler scan twice, once with the 1.2 version and again with the 1.3 version. The 1.3 version found the one error. The 1.2 version found 0 errors.

This set up will work good enough for my needs, as I don't do any glass masters anyhow. Most of my music gets converted to mp3's and put up for sale on iTunes and a few other places as mp3's only. My biggest need for burning cd's is for doing sound and mix checks on different sound systems.

Since I have an older Plextor drive, I use a different form of their software (Plextools Professional XL 3.16).  It sounds as though yours is different; when I do a CD error check, I get a graph that gives a readout of C1 errors (superfluous if under 30-100 per sector), C2 errors (correctable but dangerous if more than a few), and CU errors (uncorrectable data loss).  You need that kind of information because that's how all drives deal with the data correction process on CDs.  So in your case, "one error" is probably a C2 or CU, which would be unacceptable.  Read speed will affect the results, with slower speeds being more accurate. 

Hey, what can I say, DJ?  I want you to like this drive, and like it because it works like a champ.  Is there a manual?

No there's no manual, only a quickie installation guide. I did the BLER test over again and scored a 14 on the C1 and zero on C2, no sampling errors.  Another time the test showed 10 on the C1 and zero on C2....I'm not sure why i'm getting different results with the same test on the same disk...

Like I said, I only need cd's to do sound checks on different sound systems, as this is working good enough for my needs. The Plextor drive is much nicer than my old drive, so there' no problem with me liking it. The Creator 10 software that comes with it, also has a lite version of SureThing label making software, which can make quickie labels and case inserts and booklets. It can also do a little LightScribe. The Creator 10 does a very nice job of burning cd's very quickly. It's very easy to work with, so it's looking that'll be my replacement for AA3's burning. Adobe wanted us to use third party software for burning....so there ya go, I'll be using Creator 10....plus it didn't cost me a nickel.