To give you good advice about your options with your current Mac we'd need to know which model it is, or at least a couple of things about it. Does it have SCSI or USB as its input port, or ports? And is it a model that will accept a PCI card, so that you could add USB or Firewire?
1998 was the first year for the iMac and, if that is what you have, you can get an external USB CD burner, as was suggested above, along with software like Roxio's Toast, and you're in business. The big advantage of using both the internal CD player and an external burner along with Toast is that it's a one step operation, drag the image of the audio CD onto Toast, rearrange the order of the tracks by dragging if you want, and burn directly from the original to the copy in one step, rather than copying to the hard drive and then to the burner.
If you have a different desktop Mac, not an iMac, that instead of USB has a SCSI port, it's possible to buy a SCSI external burner but they might be hard to find and would be more expensive than a USB burner. A better alternative for one of those machines would probably be to buy a combination USB/Firewire PCI card and get an external USB or Firewire drive, as described above.
I haven't found it to be true that an external drive requires 'audio' grade blank CD's. I've got a bulletproof SCSI external burner built by APS that will write perfect CD's on absolutely any brand or grade of media, even the no-name stuff from an office supply warehouse.
1998 was the first year for the iMac and, if that is what you have, you can get an external USB CD burner, as was suggested above, along with software like Roxio's Toast, and you're in business. The big advantage of using both the internal CD player and an external burner along with Toast is that it's a one step operation, drag the image of the audio CD onto Toast, rearrange the order of the tracks by dragging if you want, and burn directly from the original to the copy in one step, rather than copying to the hard drive and then to the burner.
If you have a different desktop Mac, not an iMac, that instead of USB has a SCSI port, it's possible to buy a SCSI external burner but they might be hard to find and would be more expensive than a USB burner. A better alternative for one of those machines would probably be to buy a combination USB/Firewire PCI card and get an external USB or Firewire drive, as described above.
I haven't found it to be true that an external drive requires 'audio' grade blank CD's. I've got a bulletproof SCSI external burner built by APS that will write perfect CD's on absolutely any brand or grade of media, even the no-name stuff from an office supply warehouse.