I have recently been finding myself wanting to burn some extra cd's and maybe eventually a copy of my entire cd collection. I have found though that many cd's weither from my computer or a friend's will lack the quality of original cd's.

I have a dvd burner that will make a very good copy of an audio cd and sound good when turned up, so i have been making copies of all my cd's so that i won't be out of a few good songs and a few good dollars should i scratch or mangle one.

It is just that it takes a hella long time to sit down and do these one by one. Plus i'd rather do them on my computer.

I would like to eventually get a laptop or full computer setup for those gigs that i can use it for. i.e. birthday parties, reunions, backround music, stuff like that. the lesser gigs.

So computer tech's how do i get good sound. For starters i have a compaq with a fancy cd burner of sorts. Oh, and what music program do you use to upload? WMP is not good if you ask me, so what else is there?

For disk-to-disk copies, I suggest grabbing a copy of CDRWIN from Goldenhawk. The demo is fully functional, but limited to 1x burning. Which is actually a good thing with audio. Use the same drive for ripping and burning (let it copy the image to your hard drive).

You shouldn't be loosing quality with a copy of a 'real' CD. Unless it's converted to MP3, then burned.

As far a good playback sound from a computer is concerned, you just need a pro-level sound card. Anything by M-Audio or Echo would do nicely. There are other brands, but these two I am hands-on familar with. Echo even makes a nice PCMCIA laptop card.

I was told that my computer actually has the sound card built into the motherboard. I am not a computer expert by far but maybe i need a different computer? Does windows media player convert to mp3? Don't know off the top of my head?

Yes, Windows Media does convert to MP3. When you burn a CD using Windows media it will convert to MP3 right before the burn.

I had a reply up about adding a sound card, but it seems to have disappeared. Weird...

Usually the built-in soundcard is not of great quality. You also should get a card with more than one set of outputs (one for mix, one for monitoring) if you are going to DJ with it.

Windows Media Player converts to WMA by default, similar to MP3. So, you will loose audio quality when copying a CD using WMP.

I use Easy CD-Creator 5 for making audio or data CDs, and CDRWIN for copying.