What if we could act on our notion that some Coltrane solo would work better if he waited eight extra bars before he came in? As the open-source movement in computer software continues to strengthen its influence, frustrated music producers everywhere may get the chance to show that they, not Puff Daddy, know best how to manipulate the mixing console.

As is usually the case in the music industry, getting this sort of power has been a lengthy struggle. If you're old enough to remember the Rolling Stones' "She's a Rainbow" before a formerly cool computer maker inserted it in a TV ad, there's a good chance that your first record player had no tone control. When your thick 45s landed on the pad, you were stuck listening to them only one way -- the way the record-player manufacturer wanted you to.

Over time, record-player manufacturers have gradually given their customers more and more control over what they heard: first volume, then tone, then separation. Today's CD players let you choose what songs you want to listen to, in which order, and in which of many preset surround-sound settings. Recordable CD players take that even further.

This is much better than having no tone knob, but you still have to listen to the music pretty much the way it was recorded. Unlike printed material, you can't annotate it easily. If you're a big John Entwistle fan, for example, you can turn the bass all the way up and the treble all the way down when you listen to the Who, but that's not the most pleasant listening experience. What if you want your copy of a song to be yours alone, different from all others?

Like it or not, much of our pop culture is built around the ability to customize. Our favorite long-playing music companions tend to be the car tapes we make ourselves. We use everything from bumper stickers to Garfield stick-ons to make our cars feel individual. The promise, as Burger King puts it, is that you can Have It Your Way, every day. You can see this working out on our computers, too. Wallpaper and desktop designs help people define who they are as surely as the Dilbert panels they tack to their cubicle walls. Which MP3 file are you showing off on your desktop?

The most impressive manifestation, so far, of this urge to customize the computing environment is the open-source movement in software. Those with the talent, the inclination and the free time can pick apart programs or whole operating systems and reassemble them in ways that suit them best.

But why limit the notion of open source to computer software, which doesn't move most of us the way art does? Only programmers can take full part in the software customization process, not those of us more adept with nouns and verbs than zeros and ones. The Net has changed the way we communicate, but more than that, it is changing the way we view ownership and authorship, in all forms of business and art. Our browsers store our own bookmarks; our word processors execute self-written macros. As the open-source concept becomes more established in the software market, it can't help spreading to other varieties of intellectual property.

Today you can send a friend a perfect digital copy of a favorite song in a number of formats. But why limit yourself to the music as it was originally recorded? The current hemorrhaging at major record labels (due in large part to Universal's ingestion of Polygram) will lead inexorably to a new class of performers: too popular to go back to their day jobs, but not popular enough to score the seven-figure investment often necessary for a major label to break a record.

One way for these medium-level bands to differentiate themselves is by delivering, with their sound files, the musical version of source code: multitrack information.

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