While the popularity of online music has been a boon for some fans, it has alarmed the record industry. Record companies worry about the availability online of illegal MP3 copies of copyrighted recorded music, as well as the possibility that legal music sales could move one day directly to the Internet, bypassing the traditional labels.

But all of this ferment has been largely irrelevant to mainstream music fans, for a couple of reasons. First, it's been hard to find MP3 songs you might like. Leaving aside the illegal bootleg files, mostonline songs are from relatively unknown artists, and it's hard to distinguish among them.Second, the hardware and software needed to make audio CDs from downloaded music have been tricky to install and operate, and thus have been adopted mainly by techies and college students. A couple of portable MP3 players are for sale, including Diamond's Rio, but they are much more limited than standard CD players.

All this is changing, though. New developments both online and off promise to make downloadable music much more practical for mainstream users who are neither techies nor aficionados of obscure bands.

The online news is that two of the most trusted arbiters of musical taste -- Rolling Stone, the premier rock magazine, and the Source, a hip-hop publication -- have begun to organize and review uploaded songs from artists without record contracts. The Web site Tunes.com (www.tunes.com), which already categorizes and compiles music from known artists, has organized the new MP3 effort for the two magazines,whose Web sites are partners with Tunes.com.

Unde the new program, called Download, unsigned artists are encouraged to upload as many as five songs to either the Rolling Stone or Source Web site, along with photos, bios and other information. Staff members of the two magazines select their favorite songs to feature, giving consumers guidance from familiar sources. Eventually, unknown bands will be listed on the same pages as the most famous bands whose music theirs resembles, and a mechanism is under development to sell the new bands' music online.

The offline news is that a couple of companies have introduced recordable-CD drives for PCs and Macs that a nontechie can finally hook up and operate. Both the $399 Sony Spressa drive and the $299 Que drive, from QPS Inc., are external units that attach to a computer by the easy-to-use USB port. Older drives had to be internally installed or plugged in via add-in cards or the balky printer port. The USB drives are a bit slower, but still plenty fast.Both of thenew drives are being pitched as companions to Apple's iMac, an all-USB computer. But both can also be used with any modern Windows 98 PC and the right software.

I tested the two drives on both an iMac and a Dell Windows 98 PC. While both can copy normal computer data to a blank CD, I chose to focus on using the drives to make music CDs that can be played on any CD player. You can copy recorded CDs, make mixes of songs from recorded CDs or make CDs from downloaded files such as MP3s -- though you should take care to observe copyright rules.

Normal CD players can't play MP3 files, so the drives come with software that automatically converts the MP3 files into a format that can be copied to CDs for normal playback. The software stores these files temporarily on your hard disk. In my tests, I used the cheapest type of blanks, called CD-R disks, which can't be erased but cost only a few dollars apiece. The drives can also handle much costlier CD-RW disks, which can be erased.

To my surprise, I found that onboth computing platforms, I strongly preferred the Que drive from little-known QPS, of Yorba Linda, Calif., to the big-brand Sony Spressa. Not only was the QPS drive cheaper, it was also slightly faster. But the most important distinction was in the bundled software. QPS offers PC and Mac programs from Adaptec, the leader in this category. I found these programs relatively easy to use. The Mac software is free, and the PC software costs $29 extra. PC users must also download a free USB driver.

Sony, however, made disastrous software choices, even though its software is all free. Its Mac program, Discribe, refuses to record CDs unless you disable crucial system files first. It wouldn't even recognize the Spressa until I did that. Its Windows software, called HotBurn, was hard to use, despite a supposedly simple beginner's mode. Worse, HotBurn crashed constantly on my Dell and caused problems with Windows. So if you do buy the Spressa, I suggest you junk the included software and buy one of the Adaptecprograms for $99, on top of the Spressa's already higher price.

This whole process is still a little bit more complicated and technical than I'd like, but it's finally possible for motivated mainstream users to join the online music trend.

(www.ptech.wsj.com)