I have one of the best coaster makers in the world. And it only cost me a couple hundred bucks.

Today’s adventure begins, amazingly enough, today. I have been realizing that my CD burner wasn’t getting much use lately. To justify its initial purchase by reducing its variable cost per CD burned (man, that MBA education’s getting good use), I decided to make a “compilation compilation” CD. This term refers to my favorite songs off of what are known as “compilation” CDs, all put onto one CD all their own.

Now, recently, I had been getting irritated at RealJukebox. It’s free and all that, but there’s a lot of problems that I just can’t overlook:

• It’s a real memory hog.
• On my computer it’s got a crash rate of approximately every 3.2 minutes.
• In addition, no matter how many boxes I uncheck during the installation process, no matter how often I change the preferences to not make it my default CD player, it reclaims CD-playing abilities.

Sigh. So I deleted it.

Anyway, I picked out the songs that I wanted, and recorded them as WAV sound files using the “Easy CD Creator” software that came with the CD burner. What the “Easy CD Creator” people don’t want you to know is that “Easy CD Creator” doesn’t seem to think that if skips happen during the recording process to a WAV, the user might like to know about this and recopy the song. Oh, no…the program just happily copies the files to the hard drive.

So I get all of the files copied to the hard drive, and start recording the CD. I even put it through “testing” phase (read: wasting another 10 minutes in the name of ensuring the success of the copying process). 20 minutes later, my CD is ready.

I note that in my haste, I misspelled compilation in the title. Twice. My CD is now known as “The Compliation Complilation” to Windows CD Player. No biggie, I say to myself…I’ll be the only one to see that. So I make the jewel case covers and everything (changing the title there), and I pop the CD in the drive.

Two minutes, 32 seconds into the first song, the CD skips.

Now I’m somewhat irritated. So I go and listen to the original WAV file that I copied earlier, and I find out what I told you earlier…those two WAV files were copied badly, but “Easy CD Creator” didn’t think that was important. I guess it would have been too difficult to prompt the user to copy the song over. And “Hard CD Creator” just isn’t as catchy a title.

This is when I remember our friend RealJukebox. For all its flaws, I remember that it does a great job of recording WAV files. I jump online and grab a copy of RealJukebox, all the while listening to my now destined-to-be-under-a-glass CD for problems with other songs. Good thing too…song seven is also messed up.

Eventually the RealJukebox installer is downloaded. I go through the install process, unchecking all of the boxes, telling it I do not want it to be my default CD player, etc. Finally, that whole process is complete. Time to try again.

I get the two CDs that I need to get the songs off of, and copy them using RealJukebox. I listen to them this time, just to make sure. Everything’s perfect. I close out RealJukebox.

I now go back to “Easy CD Creator” and set it up to use the two new WAV files when burning this copy. I don’t bother to test this time, and everything turns out fine again. I get the CD out and label it.

Ready to hear my now perfect CD, I close all programs and put the CD back in the player. And what pops open as my default CD player?

That’s right, friends…RealJukebox.

This turn of events elicits a caterwaul from yours truly.

So now, of course, I’m stuck with a piece of software that doesn’t do one thing that I need it to do, but is great otherwise, and a piece of software that I hate, but have to use to accomplish that one thing.

And one new coaster.