(FORTUNE Magazine) – The problem with most CDs is that they have too many songs you don't like. Even on the best albums, there are inevitably one or two tracks that grate on your nerves. With the music publishing industry's monopoly over CD production, there hasn't been much you could do, other than punch the remote to skip the offending songs.

Like almost everything else in the music business, this state of affairs is changing. In fact, by hooking up a machine known as a CD writer to your computer, you can become a music producer in your own right. You can mix tracks from Mariah Carey, Buddy Holly, Limp Bizkit, REM, and the New York Philharmonic onto one disk. The same drive lets you record your kid's garage band, store your digital photo collection, or back up your PC's hard drive overnight.

Now, this is hardly revolutionary. The technology to produce CDs has been around for years. But early CD writers were too expensive and balky for anyone but professional musicians and audio geeks. Luckily, the latest generation of drives was designed for the rest of us, and Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus 8210e makes the whole rigmarole as easy as any gadget I've seen.

The convenience begins when you install the $350 external drive. In the past you had to open your PC to install these things or use the printer port or external drive, which often fouled up the printing. This drive just plugs in to your computer's universal serial bus port. To get the CD-Writer Plus running, load HP's software and connect the drive to the PC. That done, you can record and read CD-R disks, which store music or data permanently, as well as newer CD-RW disks, which are rewritable, much like floppies or Zip disks. The disks themselves can store 640 megabytes of computer data or 74 minutes of music.

HP includes Adaptec's Easy CD Creator software, which will walk you through the process of making a CD. If you want to store data (say, a collection of digital photos or financial records), all you have to do is select the files from your hard drive, put a disk in the CD player, and run the software.

Music CDs take more finagling, and because they require a lot of horsepower, you can't do anything else with your computer while they're cooking. To copy a whole CD, all you have to do is put the original in your existing CD-ROM drive, put a disk in the CD-Writer, and wait 20 minutes or so. If you're creating your own CD, you can pick tracks from a variety of disks--or use any standard .wav file stored on your PC--and rearrange them in any way you want.

Start recording, and the software tells you when to swap CDs. If you have enough hard-drive space, you can store the entire "image" of the new CD on your PC, and then record it--this is the most reliable method. Just don't think of this process as an easy way to get into the CD business--unless it's for personal use, duplicating CDs is illegal.

I did run into a few glitches. Occasionally, my PC lost contact with the CD-Writer and I had to restart the computer to get it to recognize the drive. I also had trouble writing disks at top speed and ruined a couple of blank CDs before deciding to drop back to a lower setting. A lot of this depends on how fast your computer can process data, and the only way to find out is to experiment. Also, the software can't convert the increasingly popular MP3 song files to CD format--you'll need a separate program to do that.

But overall, I enjoyed the experience--and I'm definitely enjoying my new CDs. If you're into music--and want data storage as part of the bargain--this technology is worth a look. For more information, call 800-752-0900, or point your Web browser to www.hpcdwriter.com.