I'm a former gaffer for video & film turned corporate guy living near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My day job is managing a corporate broadcast/webcast facility, and my nights are filled with learning the wonders of electronic media, with my main hobby being CDR media snobbery (here's a sample comment: don't ever buy Office Depot brand CDRs because I've got two that are rusting after a year!).

We're a 5 burner household; we bought our first one (an HP 7100i 2x) four and a half years ago, and wouldn't you know that the next four combined cost less than the 2x! The other four are: Yamaha 8x, TDK 16x, Buslink/Liteon 32x and a Buslink 40x (my personal fave for reasons explained below).

After having all of the flavors/versions of EZ CD, I'm totally in love with Nero Burning ROM, in a large part because the last 3 drives came with lite versions of it, but also because it's actually "E-Z'er" than EZ DC, and I can burn with more than one drive at a time (the TDK 16x & the Buslink 32x play best together @ 16x; don't know why).

One of the larger challenges had been trying to get Direct CD to play nice with Nero BR since I've had nothing but problems with INCD. Guess what the answer was? I completely gave up on using CD-RWs! They are so slow, and can literally be 100 times more expensive than CDrs, so the heck with them! The best thing about my newest drive is that it will play ANY CDRW regardless of the buring software (sorry about the shout, but this really cool).

Also, this plays into my plan to discover which CDR media is best since I'll have 1000s of disks created over a period of years from many manufacturers with which to test. By the way, the HP gold disk that came along with my first burner? Still works just fine, though I can't say the same for the rusting Office Depot units!


So much for a quick hello.....