Advice wanted: PC CD Writers.

[M Holmes]

I'm giving some consideration to buying a CD-writer for a home PC. I'm
likely to use it for offline storage of data. However I'd also like to
get some of my old LP's moved onto CD. I know next to nothing about the
technology so I'm looking for advice as to what criteria to use for
selection of the hardware and recommendations and what other kit I'd
need to support the hardware. I'll be buying something to mount
internally in a tower unit.

Also, since I will be dealing with LP's I'm looking for advice as to
which software would be useful for such a project. Software which
allowed some sort of filtering/editing would be useful if it could take
out hiss from cassettes and pops and click from LP's without too much
manual effort. Also I'd like to be able to properly index tracks, even
when tracks are sequed on the LP. Obviously there'll be some freeware
out there to do such stuff but I'm willing to pay reasonable prices if
it gets me better software or software that requires less hands on to do
filtering.

Being able to write Mpeg files of music would also be useful.

Finally, I've heard of TV tuner cards for PCs, but is there a card which
would allow Mpeg files downloaded from the Net onto videotape in PAL/VHS
format?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

FoFP