"IT'S YOUR MUSIC," burn it on a Mac." That's the advice of George Clinton, delivered at the end of Apple's latest paean to its new recordable CD-drive-equipped iMacs. Produced by TBWA/Chiat Day, the sixty-second spot debuted this month with an all-star cast of indie musicians that might have been more at home on an old episode of MTV's 120 Minutes: Liz Phair, Smash Mouth, Iggy Pop, De La Soul, Aimee Mann, along with about a dozen others. (The truly au courant indie bands -- your Coldplays and your Badly Drawn Boys -- apparently prefer the more comforting domain of ABC prime-time promos and Gap ads.) And while the assembled talents suggest that a cover of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" can't be far away, they fail to play a note of music during the spot. Instead, they nod obligingly, gathered together in an otherwise empty theater, as a stereotypical twenty-something Napster user dictates a dream set list to them. "For this CD, I'd like to start out with Liz, 'Polyester Bride.'" Her coquettish reply: "Sure, for you."

The tag line that follows the parade of alterna-stars -- "Rip. Mix. Burn." -- resonates subtly with the pro-Napster chorus without actually sounding the digital-music-wants-to-be-free keynote, which is all well and good given the state of Napster these days. What's more troubling about the spot is the radical proposition that Apple's technologies will allow you to burn your own audio CDs. Not just because CD-burners have been standard-issue gear in the PC world for more than a year. What's really troubling about the "Rip. Mix. Burn." campaign is that mix tapes have been standard issue since the days of Steve Perry and "Break My Stride." The only difference between the custom sequence of Van Morrison songs you made to impress your seventh-grade girlfriend and your iMac-burned CD mix is a few notches of audio quality -- unless of course you're burning less-than-128-bit MP3 files, in which case your cassette mix from the early eighties might well sound better.

But if CD mixes of songs you already own aren't such a big deal, and if The Man has stopped the free music for good, is there no hope for the digital music revolution after all? Actually, there is hope. But it has nothing to do with CDs -- or even, necessarily, MP3s. It's a revolution that is already within reach: It's what happens when your home stereo is also your computer, or when your normal amp and speakers get information about what song to play from your computer. The dream scenario here is not custom-tailoring an audio CD for just the right occasion -- it's the more prosaic ritual of buying a CD at Tower Records, coming home, and copying the uncompressed audio files to your hard drive. Once you've made the copy, there's no need ever again to bother with that ridiculous disk, and its all-too-fragile jewel case. Repeat the process a few hundred times and you have your entire library digitally accessible. It's your music -- you can start listening with a few clicks. Suddenly, the idea of painfully organizing your CDs alphabetically seems as absurd as manually organizing your Word documents in alphabetical order. The software does it for you -- in fact, as more metadata becomes available online, through services like the brilliant CDDB, you'll be able to navigate through your music collection by date of release, or by producer, or by songs whose lyrics contain the word "polyester."

The first generation of MP3 and AIFF-playing applications -- WinAmp, Real Jukebox, SoundJam, iTunes -- are an important first step in this direction, but a few additional elements need to be in place before our computers become genuine stereo components. Most importantly, PC manufacturers can't assume that the audience is eager to replace their stereo with a PC. Many consumers have invested in high-end receivers, amplifiers, surround-sound processors, and speakers that deliver far higher quality audio than a PC with a pair of one hundred tweeters attached. The PC should be a replacement for the CD player component, not the whole stereo system itself. But to make that transition a smooth one, you need PCs that are capable of doing two things that computers don't usually do very well. First, they need to be so stable that they almost never require a restart. And they need an easy way to separate the music audio from the other alert sounds that PCs make in their everyday use -- ideally by including separate audio outs for digital music. (Nothing ruins listening to Joni Mitchell's "Blue" faster than a booming "You've got mail!" in the middle of the second verse.) Ironically, Apple's new OS X operating system -- officially released on Saturday -- lays the groundwork for a crash-proof audio platform, though the separate music channels remain a pipe dream for now. Of all the PC makers, only Sony stands a better chance of convincing mainstream consumers to integrate their PCs into their home stereos. But if Apple is going to make that argument, it will need to do more than sell the virtues of digital-age mix tapes.