[GordonF]

Given MTU's stern warnings about CD Writer quality I asked my PC dealer carefully about the CDG compatibility requirement. The dealer happened to have a HP 9210e (external SCSI) drive.

While I had to pay a service fee like for any machine brought in for diagnosis, they agreed to sell me the 9210e only if it worked with the Microstudio Demo.

"I was tense!"
"I was nervous!"
"I guess it... just wasn't my night!"

...actually, it worked perfectly. I risked only a tech service charge and it was a small price to pay compared to receiving a possibly bad CD Writer in the mail or by courier. Like MTU says, there's still the chance the CDG capability won't work because HP doesn't test CDG in their factory.

I recommend SCSI drives and a bus mastering SCSI adapter for burning any CDs, including CDG disks, so you can safely do other stuff at the same time as the burning happens. The ATAPI burners, even the UDMA ones, hog too much CPU time and interruptions in the process will turn your disk into a coaster. Also use good quality media - while MTU rates Kodak third compared to Mitsui, I can't get Mitsui media up here and Kodak's gold dye CD-Rs work great, at least on the local Karaoke bars' players even when recorded at 4x speed (I haven't tried 8x even though the drive's supposed to support it).

Other software can read CDG disks and play them on the same list of drives that MTU specifies. I think only the Microstudio software understands the format that Karaoke Home Producer uses for .cdg files though since nothing else seems to play the files for me. It's also a nice generic CD Audio writer, though I'd like MTU to add the capability to burn audio CDs from MP3 files or from other audio files. My biggest gripe is conflict with Adaptec DirectCD, needed to handle CD-RW media like any other removable media, and its requirement to disable auto-insert notification, which other CDG players need to have working.