Sometimes technology lets you do things you normally wouldn't do, such as mass duplicating your CD collection just for the heck of it.

That's the situation we faced when testing two CD duplicators from Kanguru and Primera Technology. The products are designed to mass-produce CDs by touching only a few buttons. They're aimed at businesses that want to duplicate many CDs of marketing material (press releases, photos and the like), and the prices reflect this. You won't see these on sale at Best Buy for the general public.

But still, with these devices it's possible to take your Eminem CD and produce 20 copies in less than an hour (although a sticker on the Kanguru device warns against this, and the Primera software does, too).

Like the VCR, which lets you tape a movie that you could repackage and sell, these devices let you copy a master CD and duplicate it many, many times, very, very quickly. Just don't blame us if the RIAA comes knocking on your door - we told you it was for marketing materials. Of course, we kept our CDs for back-up purposes only.

Copy without a computer

The Kanguru Autoloader 100 lets you create up to 100 CDs at a time at 52x recording speeds. The great thing about the device is that you can mass-produce CDs without having to connect to a computer. Once the device is assembled, just drop your blank CDs into a hopper, place your master CD into the bottom drive, and then press a button to copy. You also can test the system, erase and perform other functions The device then takes over, dropping a blank CD into the second drive, creating a copy and then using its robotic arm to deliver the completed CD to a spindle. Initially we had some difficulty constructing the spindle, but after a few trial-and-error drops it worked so we could leave the room and let the machine make copies. The copying took about 3 minutes for a full 650M-byte CD.

One downside is that the CDs remain unlabeled, so you would have to use a label program or get out your magic marker and write on the CD to complete the project.

The system costs $1,600, so the price should discourage all but the most hardcore CD bootleggers from buying it. For companies that produce lots of CDs (we get most of our press kits now on CDs), the device can be a great time-saver because you need little technical expertise.