I reckon I'm pretty handy with a computer, but two things I've never really bothered trying are burning music CDs and downloading music.

I'm getting married in 5 weeks, and we're having a disco in between the ceilidh band, with yours truly picking the tunes and making a CD.

I've got 90% of the tunes I want on CD already, but will need to download a few off the net - I don't mind paying for downloads if they're reasonable and if they've got the tunes I want, in a format I can use, but am quite prepared to go the P2P route if necessary, which sites would you recommend ?

Also, having only ever burned one CD (which only worked on a handful of players) I need some advice on that too. The band reckon their equipment wants everything in wav format. I'm want to be able to rip tunes from music CDs to the HDD then burn them to CDR or CDRW. I guess I probably need some software for that ? Might also like the facility to add some effects - fading in/out, mixing, whatever - if it's not too much hassle.

Anyway, I'm at your mercy, what does everybody think ?

You could burn them in standard cdda format which is what an ordinary audio cd is, that should play anywhere.

A couple of pay mp3 sites I use are, www.allofmp3.com and www.mp3search.ru , both sites are legal in their country of origin but allow foreign users to signup. Prices are un USD and range from 10 cents a track to around 50 cents.

Commercial CDs are already in WAV format (I think - haven't bought any in a while *ahem*). The link below has lots of freeware audio tools - discovered it a couple of days ago when I wanted to chop up some mp3s and turn them to ringtones :

http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/gmm/fwcdrip.html

Just had a look at the one CD I burned (ages ago) it's all cda files. Then I stuck in a new "original" CD, it's showing cda files as well.

The CD I burned before was fine in my new(ish) ghetto blaster, didn't work on my 5 year old Discman, didn't play on my 15 year old Philips CD seperate, was fine on my new DVD player, can't remember what happened when I tried it in the Octy. So I guess the older equipment just doesn't like CDRW discs rather than there being a file format problem.

The snapfiles link looks really good, any in particular you'd recommend ?

Yes definitely CD-RW's don't work at all reliably in audio equipment - surprised you had any success at all - but normal, record-once CD-R's are much easier. That said, my 10 year old (cheap) system doesn't play them either, but I've never had any problems playing in anything else.

As for recommended programmes, I've got this as a ripper/encoder/converter:

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/dbpoweramp.html

It's excellent, can't believe it's freeware

Don't know how it compares to the others as it's the only one I tried