The people that you speak to at the office are probably used to using the first generation of CD-DA extraction tools. The first tool that comes to mind in Linux that is a representation of this is cdda2wav. These tools tried to copy the data - mostly skipping errors - as is, sometimes resulting in pops at higher speeds because they failed to correct "jitter" from the CD-DA extraction process. Therefore, one had to find the fastest speed at which this would not occur, and sometimes, they had to rip at 1x.
The second generation of tools is much better at extracting audio. For
example, cdparanoia hasn't had a problem extracting audio from a single
CD that my sister or I have had. (And my sister doesn't take very good
care of her CDs.) I've had CDs that skip horribly in my CD player rip
perfectly (albeit sloooowly) with cdparanoia. Cdparanoia will
automatically adjust the speed that your drive reads at to compensate
for errors, and will reread sections of the disc if there are errors.
Now, when it comes to CD recording, the brand does matter, at least if
you want your CD to play in 20 year old CD players. I own a CD player
from 1982, and it will not play any type of burned CD except for Taiyo
Yuden blanks. (In America, these are usually sold under the Fujifilm
brand.) For some reason, the CD player will only "see" these, and not
any other dye formulation. YMMV when it comes to a car CD player, since
I don't have one in my old car. What I would do in your case, however, is
try to get a sampler pack, that is buy one of each kind of disc that you
can find, burn them all, and test them. The one that works (and sounds)
the best to you is the type that you should buy for CD Audio from this
point on. (I hear that silver CD-Rs are all the rage now...)
As for overburning, I believe that it is possible in XCDRoast, but if
you're burning or copying audio CDs, I believe that cdrdao is your best
choice because it's always DAO recording, it uses cdparanoia to copy
audio CDs, it can read .cue sheets from a popular Windows program, and
it has a very wide range of writing options that may be supported by
newer or more advanced CD Writing drives.
Hope this helps,
--
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Edward Guldemond
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