I'll start with the easiest thing first. My CD burner came with Adaptecs EZ CD creator software. It works fine since I have already made music CDs from my WAV files. Real simple, just point and click and go get some coffee (its slow). As far as the line-in jack is concerned...Maybe I don't know enough to hear the difference (there are others here with more experience), but I've input all my music so far, live guitar, vocal, sequenced DR-5 tracks into the line-in, and I think it sounds OK. I just think my multi-tracking software is a little noisy above 2 to 3 tracks. I might be able to improve that by shortening my cables. Its kind of a birdsnest.