Hi Steve, John and all!
-> JA> The CDRs work quite well! You can "roll your own" in any
-> JA> order you desire with point and click control.  The HP unit is
-> JA> down to $599 locally. The blanks can be had for around $6.00 (US)
->
-> Cool!  I would have thought the recording industry
-> would have gotten $15 of sales tax applied to the
-> sale of blanks  :)
->
-> I've been on the receiving end of custom burned CD
-> software and been employed at sites that had the
-> burners, but I didn't know if they could cut music
-> CDs.  Bits is bits, right?  JUST KIDDING!  Don't
-> wanna start anything around here  :)
Most CD burners can cover any format of that size, some like the HP ones
can handle 1.3 and 2.6 Gig blanks in addition to the 650 MB
CD/CD-ROM/Enhanced disks.
There will be a time where you can order your music online, and download
it to your computer where you can then burn it to the media of your
choice, or mix and match what you have on your disks to custom made
disks of favorite tunes.
I think that tax on media was a bad solution to a problem.. what about
those of us that make original music, yet have to pay BMI or ASCAP a fee
for that blank media because it is assumed that it will be used for
making pirate copies of stuff.
Music, films and video on demand will be the next century's way of
buying your home entertainment, once the costs of high speed connections
and personal CD burners get lower. Slow speed connections like a 14.4 or
28k modem may be fine for overnight downloads in a stream.. it would
take ISDN or better to get live access video and audio compressed with
an algorithm like one of the MPEGs or other.
The cheapest complete setup in a bundle of CD burner, publishing
software that I've seen so far is about $599, but I expect the prices to
be under $400 within months and probably under $300 which should be the
gateway price that most will begin buying one for themselves by the end
of next year.
The "media on demand" to be to be a viable option for most by the end of
the century. Imagine taking your credit card and buying a music right
via the Internet, then having the media streamed to you overnight where
it is immediately written to a CD which you then may copy parts of to a
"best of" CD for your car or boom box.
Bonnie *:>
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