There is a project named qmultirecord:
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/qmultirecord-101896.shtml
which promises to do this on top of my burn program
cdrskin. I did not test it myself, because i am a
command liner.
Is it really that hard to create one or two scripts
which the kids can start from icons or by easy to
memorize command line words ? (Kid brains are very
elastic, aren't they ?)
As for the scruples of coteyr: There is no obstacle for
doing this in principle. Occasionally i burn with two
drives while having another two drives reading for
verifying. (I have 2 PATA, 1 SATA, 3 USB.)
A burn backend, that automatically scans for all drives
before burning, would be quite hostile towards other
users of the system and get bad critics from multi-user
sysadmins. Some GUI burn programs might indeed do this.
Bad would be PATA attached drives which share the same IDE
controller (e.g. on older Linux: hdc and hdd). But PATA
is becomming rare.
Another obstacle is the fact that burning is a synchronous
userspace process. We do not have the priorities which the
kernel can use and we have to wait for each WRITE command
to end, before we can send a new one. The kernel can queue
multiple such commands without waiting for the first to
finish. So you need some CPU reserve for good reactivity.
Further your hard disk will have to jump between the two
data sources from which the burn processes read. I am
sure that my olde system would not be able to feed two
DVD burns with 20x speed (27 MB/s each).
But hey, even 40x CD speed is just 6 MB/s.
Have a nice day :)
Thomas