The HP CD-R is now on sale for $599, complete with very decent 
software. With it, you can indeed select different tracks from different CDs 
(depending upon your computer setup) and burn a "favorites" CD. For me, this 
is very appealing for mobile apps.
        From Binnies message, the $599 isn't where these will bottom out, and 
from her messages I am guessing the price slide will be fairly rapid, like we 
saw with RAM and Fixed Disks.
        If you have a CD player already in your system and add a CD-R unit, 
you can copy directly from one to the other, like dubbing a tape. I am not 
positive, but believe there is no use of the fixed disk for buffering as I 
had expected there to be. I watched the HD light very carefully and could see 
no evidence of HD access in such a manner to be consistant with HD buffering.
        In my case I just added an NEC MultiSpin 4x4 CD unit that is a 4 disk 
changer in a half height slot. They are selling for $99!!! And, although only 
a 4x speed, and IDE in configuration, they clip along at a good rate and will 
allow me to load up four different audio CDs and choose the best from each 
for burning to the CD-R unit without shuffling every track or two.
        My only big problem with the whole thing is that I am an avowed OS/2
WARP nut....hate Windows and more especially Windows 95. I am running dual 
boot and have Windows NT V 4.0 loaded, but would rather run OS/2 for this.
Cheers, John
--- Maximus/2 3.01
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