A friend of mine is thinking to get into the audio world. He has some friends that are wicked good musicians without contracts, and he has a friend who owns about $60k in recording studio equipment.

He wants to record and product an album for a guy, and sell the albums at his gigs. However, we have the recording equipment, but not the volume CD burning equipment... That's where I come in.

Being the only guy who knows how a computer works, it is my duty to build out a machine capable of burning X number of discs at a time. But what are the requirements?

I have only worked with dual and quad-core machines, with 600w PSUs and 4 or more gigs of ram for the past few years... So I am hazy on the low-spec business.

What kind of requirements does a single drive take to burn at 48x? How do CPU, memory, PSU and HD needs scale with the addition of simultaneous drives? I found the software, and the OS is going to be a SUPER stripped version of XP. I would do *nix, hell, a fresh Gentoo build just for the machine... But I don't know of software that would cut it. Any?

So, requirements scaling? Right now, simple, 4 drives burning the same image at the same time. Minimum reqs? If I add a PCIe controller for 4 or six more drives, what are the minimum specs now? (6-8 drives)

Anyone have ideas?

Some may say just do a search, which I did, which brought me here, as all the google results pointed me to CDFreaks. But none of the results really helped me, so now I ask, straight up.

Any CPU you can get your hands on would be able to burn CDs at any speed without any trouble at all.

I would make sure the system has enough memory to cache the entire CD image (or WAV files or whatever the source format is) in the file cache, so that multiple burning programs or processed aren't reading from the harddrive at the same time.

My guess is that 2 GB would be fine for that purpose.

If you're burning only one CD image at a time, a single harddrive will be enough. If you want to burn many different CD images at a time, then you may need more than one harddrive and/or more main memory.

I'd also try to have as many independent PATA/SATA controllers as possible for your CD burners (or DVD burners used for CD burning).

If you use burning software that allows one instance of the program to write the same image to multiple drives simultaneously, then you can get away with using less main memory. This limits the available software choices drastically, however.

Since I haven't done exactly what you want to accomplish, I won't be more specific about requirements.

Welcome to CDFreaks!

I am understanding that the bottleneck is the harddrive interface here...

Would a live-boot linux distro with the ISO cached to RAM be quicker?

If you need to burn a lot of discs in a short period of time, you might want to look into CD duplicators... But they are not cheap..