The days of digital recordings are here, and record-company execs foresee a time when it will be easier for music fans to get a recording via e-mail than it will be to actually buy it. Like all those identical brooms spawned by the mischievous sorcerer's apprentice, copies of digitally encoded recordings, each a perfect replication of its original, will fan out across the Internet, depriving artists and record companies of due royalties.

That's the fear, anyway. The reality is that the music industry probably has less to worry about than it thinks. Technically speaking, digital re-recording is anything but flawless.

One would assume copying a digital recording on a computer would be like copying, say, a text document on a computer. The original would be identical to the original, yes? Maybe not. "While it's true that 'bits are bits,' there are reasons why CD-Rs may sound different even when the data matches exactly," writes Andy McFadden on the excellent CD-Recordable FAQ Web site (www.fadden.com/cdrfaq). Not all CD recorders perform error corrections. CD players might not deliver all the bits to the computer accurately. The CD being recorded might be dirty. Or the sampling frequency of the recorder may not equal that of the player. The laser in either the CD player or the CD writer may be slightly misaligned. Then there's the whole mysterious problem of jitter, the doubling up or skipping over of samples that are extracted from an audio CD, a problem still fairly prevalent in CD recorders.

What does all this mean? It means the copy of Exile in Guyville you made for a friend might sound virtually the same as the original, but the second-generation copy he or she made for another friend might not. Digital copies are far from perfect. Among all the compression methods, software glitches, differing sampling rates, substandard hardware, file formats, successive copying, and other factors, digital recordings clearly diminish in quality as they are passed from person to person. This won't stop people from making mix CDs for their friends, or passing songs around the Net, of course. But sooner or later, music fans, always a picky lot, will return to the source to purchase the original music in its full window-rattling clarity.

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