call me somewhat new at this game, but i mistakenly assumed when i bought cd-rw's i'd be able to edit the data on them. is there ANYTHING out there which allows you to copy and edit cd's, or are they mainly to back up things and record music (as my son tells me). You can edit data on them in the sense that you can burn something to a rw disc, read it back later, edit it, and the burn it to the disc again. The drawback of course is that USUALLY you will NEED to burn all data to the disc again, not just the data you edited. There are two ways of alleviating this a bit though.

If you need to be able to add new data to a rw disc you can burn it as a multi session disc. This way previous data will not be deleted when you add new data. You can continue doing this until the disc is full.

If you install a Packet Writing software like NERO InCD you can utilize the disc as a big floppy/hard drive. Though there are some drawback to this as described on the page I linked.Thanks for the information. I'll research the link and see if it's something i really want or need to do.

Though i'm new, this looks like a great site for finding answers to my QUESTIONS in a much faster and simpler way.

thanks again.