According to Mel Seder:

I installed 7.3 over the weekend and would like to start burning some audio CD's for my car and stereo system. Now I'd like to do the same with 7.3.

I did a custom->everything install and selected the ide-scsi option when the install prompted me. I have a PLEXTOR as my CD writer and a CREATIVE as my CD ROM. The PLEXTOR hardware was installed as the master when my box was originally assembled and has not been changed. cdrecord -scanbus finds my PLEXTOR but not the CREATIVE. GRUB is my boot loader.

The installer probably just sets up the ide-scsi emulation for CD-R and CD-RW drives, and not CD-ROM drives. You shouldn't really need ide-scsi for your CD-ROM, although I think some programs like XCDRoast may only support ripping tracks from SCSI devices. You may want to try adding an option the the kernel command line in /boot/grub/grub.conf to coax emulation of that drive, if it matters.

I've only once set up ide-scsi on such a dual CD drive system, and at the time, I only intended to set it up for the CD-R, but the CD-ROM drive came along for the ride. I suspect it was a quirk in the kernel at the time. (This was a Red Hat 6.1 system, without kernel updates, if I recall.) I had put an append="hdc=ide-scsi" in /etc/lilo.conf, and hdd was also remapped, so I ended up going with the flow, and added hdd=ide-scsi to the append in case a subsequent kernel update changed this behaviour, but I never did look into it any further.

I was exposed to some of the non-gui programs for CD Writing and the command line parameters were, IMHO, cryptic at best. I think I would be better off using a nice, well behaved gui for the task at hand rather than learning CD Writer technical terms and lingo.

I have a couple/few questions.

1. Which app would you suggest I use for burning CD-R's?

I've been happy with gcombust. I've tried XCDRoast and keasycd and found them lacking. (That was over a year ago, mind you!) I usually install the latest alpha releases of the cdrtools packages from the falsehope mirror on MUUG's server, along with their build of gcombust. I've mostly used this only for data CDs, though, and not audio. I used an older version of gcombust over a year ago to copy an audio CD directly from drive to drive, but several of the tracks it copied ended prematurely. I'd expect the more recent versions to be more reliable now, but I haven't pursued this further. (Newer versions support cdparanoia, while the older one I used before didn't.)

See ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/falsehope/pub/cdrtools/alpha/ and ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/falsehope/pub/gcombust/

As heretical as it may seem on this forum, I've been quite happy with Nero and Roxio CD recording software on Win98 for making audio CDs at home.

2. Are there any web sites I can get/share MP3's at? I tried getting

limewire but if I recall correctly I had trouble with either getting the Jave Runtime or installing it.

Depends on what you're looking for. There's legal stuff available on mp3.com, which is supposedly advertiser-supported, as well as folk MP3s at efolk.com. I haven't looked into the currently popular file sharing sites.

3. Would someone be willing to assist me in getting up and running?

===== "The sooner you make five thousand mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them." - Kimon Nicolaides

Well, if you take Nicolaides' advice, maybe you should try getting it up and running on your own. :-P Seriously, though, I'm sure if you run into problems and post details here, you'll get some help.