I finally talked my brother into buying a CD-RW drive this year. He decided on the HP 9350i. I also talked him into letting me install in into my computer. Anyway... I've been using it mainly to make my music CDs. It'll burn a CD in around 7 minutes at 10X. Depending on which type of CD-R you use you should get satisfactory sound quality out of your burned CDs. It has a program with it called HP My CD. This utility will let you make copies of a disc or copy your MP3s to a CD. Now most CD-RW drives out there don't come with the software that will convert an MP3 back to a .wav format so that a CD player in say a car could read it. However, the HP does. All I have to do is drag my songs (in MP3 format) over to the list for the CD-R and this program automatically converts it for me.
There is one disadvantage to those of you who may have a ton of MP3s. Each and every time you open the HP My CD program it searches your entire disk, which on my machine takes around 1-2 min. to complete. Also, this software doesn't sort your music... If you already have your music sorted in windows explorer, I would recommend waiting for the search to finish and then just dragging your songs from explorer to the other window. (Note: If you prefer to use explorer, it's a good idea to wait until the search has stopped before opening your explorer window. I have had my system lock up several times when I forgot to wait.)
One other thing I was impressed with was it's ability to rip music from a CD. For those of you who don't know, ripping is when you have a program that copies a song from a music CD onto your hard disk in the form of an MP3 file. See my review of Xing's Audio Catalyst for more information. Anyway, what I was saying was that it rips songs much better than the Sony DVD player that came preinstalled in my computer. So for those of you who like to build your MP3 collections and have the ability to carry your music with you on the go, I would definately recommend the HP CD-RW 9350i.



Recommended: Yes