everybody has been right one way or another. LOL

Mel, there are so many ways to go about it. I think it comes down to what you're comfortable with and what you'd like to do.

all suggestions are good.

my personal preferences when taking photos to a local place for instant gratification is to put it onto a USB stick (called thumb drives as Jean has mentioned).

And they are cheaper than dirt these days. Compare that with CD's

USB is convenient and you can get a 4 Gig for under 20 dollars if you buy them on sale...

a CD holds roughly 700 MB's of data (it'll say 800MB on some, but at least 100 of those are alloted)

and you can only use that one time. (Unless you get a CD-RW but I don't care for those either. LOL)

I just don't use CD's anymore. Especially the CD-R's. They can only be used ONE time and the amount of memory in a CD is just not enough for what I need these days. So I use CD-R's only to write music these days, that IS until we get I-pods(I know, I know, I know....we need to come aboard, but I kept on waiting for the NEXT generation )

on-line photo places are great if you can wait a few days and I love on-line shopping. If they start selling groceries, I would NEVER leave this house.

(If every one of my clients come on board to online video conferencing, I really will never leave this house. LOL)

~~~~~~~~~~~~

as to the music CD's and data CD's. This is what I know:

audio cd's have a hard encoded section at the beginning which tells the machine it is audio cd.

the dye is slightly different

non-audio cd's don't play in all cd players.
audio cd's are supposed to

with that said, I DO know that some programs are able to by-pass the music CD's hard endcode section and are able to let one write data onto the music CD

and....some data CD's CAN write music. But if it is played in an older CD player, it might not work.

Music CD's dye's and encoding are supposed to make it universal to the laser reading in most(if not all) CD players.

hope that helped.



PS, I do want to mention that most people just pull out thumb drives without going to "safely remove hardware" option. While 99% of the time, this might work and be OK...I would always use the safely remove hardware option because that ONE time, can lose precious datas and corrupt the whole freakin' drive....grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (or remove the drive AFTER the puter is turned off)