1) Does anyone know of a very fast cd copying program? Or, what do you use? Right now I use either Nero or CDClone.
Everyone here seems to prefer EAC (Exact Audio Copy), and I'd be wary aboutr using things that claim to be 'fast'. 'Fast' often translates into 'crappy' where ripping CD's is concerned, though a lot does depend on your drive, and the burner used to make the CD in the first place.
2) The thought has crossed my mind to upload my shows onto my hard drive, so that they can be burned faster straight from the drive. However, to do this I would have to compress my audio files into something like RAR. If I were to do this would I lose any sound quality for those files?
No, if you compress the shows using .RAR or .ZIP or something like that, you would not lose any quality. If you're going to do that, though, you'd probably get better results by compressing it with FLAC or SHN or something of that nature. As a bit of a test, I took a ~5 minute 44/16 .WAV from a recording I made in October... here are the size results (using 'best' compression for both):
10/12/2004 01:13 PM 52,555,484 05 - Back To Tennessee (Commander Cody cover).wav
11/08/2004 11:11 PM 26,096,815 commander_Cody.flac
11/08/2004 11:10 PM 31,192,789 commander_cody.rar
Whether the approximate 10-15% savings of using FLAC over RAR (and having to decode the desired show prior to burning) is worth it, is up to you and your free disk space. But just keep in mind that you'll probably need ABOUT 400 megabytes per 74-minute CD of material you want to store on the HDD, give or take.