Hello, I've finally given up on cheap crap. I've come to realize that there is a point where I'm probably not going to need to burn a CDrom at a speed greater than 48x. I just don't care! Give me a 200 speed burner and I'll take the 48x for $10 cheaper. I've had an older HP burner finally die and I'm looking to replace it. I'm looking or some expert advice in getting the best one (not the cheapest, not the most features, but the best) CD Burner currently on the shelves of stores that I can use with Linux. I only burn a handful of CD's in a week but about 90% of the CD's I burn are audio CD's (not MP3's). I need to meet the following requirements: 1) Decent speed. 48x-24x-48x is about the range I'm looking for. If there is something faster than that I might take it. 2) Good Digital Audio Extraction speed. a 48x reader that extracts at 12x is unreasonable. 3) Good interaction with CDparanoia. This means that the -S speed setting should work (most drives ignore this) 4) No TOC skew. I doubt any recorder has TOC skew these days anyway. 5) Good interaction with CDRDAO to read-toc correctly and quickly with as few errors as possible 6) Good interaction with CDRDAO to write correctly and quickly with as few errors as possible. Burn-proof (or simlilar technology) is a must. CDRDAO must be able to utilize the burn proof tech in the drive. 7) Lower price wouldn't hurt, but isn't a big deal. If anyone can offer suggestions in the form of first hand experience, or pointers to good sources of info I'd appreciate it. FYI, If anyone is interested, I plan on doing the following: Use cdparanoia to grab the entire CD as one big wav file. Use cdrdao to make a TOC file from the CD. Use cdrdao to burn a copy with the wav file and the TOC. This will prevent any problems with silence between tracks on live albums and allow me to have a copy that CDDB/FreeDB can recognize. Write or find a simple shell script to take the .WAV file and .TOC and by starting and stopping at different points pass it through LAME to encode MP3's (one per track). Delete the .WAV and TOC after I've copied or MP3 encoded it as many ways as I see fit.