Best software for burning and/or cloning audio CDs?

Answer 1 is any of them.

Answer 2 is that an audio CD actually has 2 layers of data integrity.

(1) The error content of the data that is recorded on the disc with error detection and correction keys incorporated into it.

(2) The error content of the audio data itself, over and above any error detection or correction that is required due to errors in (1).

It turns out that the error rate in (1) is called BER or Bit Error Rate, and there may be a number of errors on an apparently good disc.

BER depends on the media and the recorder. Some recorders do better at this than others, but (2) is always low enough to be nearly or even vanishing. A few errors can be tolerated and are handled by means of error/detection concealment features of the player.

The error rate in (2) is usually very low and may even be zero.

Data CDs (CD ROMs) have what amounts to being yet another layer of error detection and recovery so that the computer files you store on them can be counted to generally be perfect.

+1 !

The error sources I have run across tend to be by far HW and media, not SW. A bad CD can introduce errors, and an older CD writer or one used at top speed may cause errors. For me running the burner at somewhat under its top speed rating can help a lot (more dwell time for the laser to write the bits).

Whatever errors are added are normally corrected by the very extensive error encoding of the format itself, as Arny has said. Wikipedia actually has a decent explanation of Red Book (standard CD) data and error correction formatting.

When a disc skips, it is usually because I (or one of the family) dropped it or slid it across something and scratched it. Throwing a bunch of CDs sans cases into the glove box, or even a desk drawer, is a sub-optimal storage technique, as my teens have learned. Now of course they have MP3 players.