It's so simple it's almost a crime. When you purchase the mr8, you go online to the Fostex website and download the wave manager. The mr8 has a usb port installed, and you can use the wave manager to copy your tracks directly to a folder that you specify on your pc. Then you can use any number of recording softwares out there to mix and master them and burn to cd. I haven't tried and don't know if it is possible to burn directly to cd with the mr8, but I don't think you can. You can burn the copied tracks to cd, though, because the mr8 copies them to the pc as mono wave files. If that's all you need, then you're good to go. If you want stereo, then you need some sort of software. Everyone on here talks about ntrack. I can't say yeah or nay on it, though, because I use something else. Ntrack is inexpensive and user friendly from what I gather, though.