i am pretty happy with roxio toast 6 and iTunes roxio has some really nice stuff in the bundle with jam and a light copy of bias. you can set your tracks up like a real CD it has data back up features as well as some programs to design labels jackets and so on. its really simple stuff that is easy to use and still get some rather nice stuff out of it on the other hand you can get "by" with iTunes for audio on a lot of stuff but i have always thought that toast was worth it. i think mac world has some articles about it and also the roxio website has a lot of stuff and even a demo i think. if you are really a geek you might find something open source that is out there (i know of at least one for mac) i think that the only open source stuff i could find had to be compiled or something. but if you want red book burning with a lot of other options i think roxio has it on Mac at least...