My experience with downloading, ripping CDs, burning mixes and so forth has been overwhelmingly positive. Nobody ever stuck a rootkit or some other buried surveillance tool on my computer, and while some CDs refuse to be ripped (or even play properly on computers), I've had more flexibility with music than I could have imagined five years ago.

But I think I just hit a wall.

Last year I bought a new computer, and part of the plan was to transfer about 2,000 songs sitting on an old computer's hard drive to the new machine.

Keep in mind, I had burned all of those songs to the old hard drive from my personal CD collection, which I figured meant I could do anything I wanted with them, including ship them from place to place.

It appears, however, that the makers of Windows Media Player have a different, narrower view of my rights. Because, as of now, I have sort of lost the ability to listen to about 1,000 of those songs, thanks to what people in music and tech circles call "Digital Rights Management," or DRM - and thanks also, I confess, to my own ignorance.

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The ad touting the iPhone's video capability just aired a moment ago while I was watching some old media - a ballgame on TV - and I've decided this commercial does an excellent job of summarizing where we are today:

"You'll be surprised by some of the stuff you find on YouTube, but when it comes right down to it, maybe the biggest surprise is finding YouTube on your phone."

Put another way: It's really not about the content anymore, be it a YouTube video of a skateboarding dog or this week's podcast of two guys talking. Content doesn't change much; only the means of delivery. And what "surprises" us most nowadays is the platform - the technology for transmitting the call, the song and the TV program. Apple is being coy when it says "maybe." People don't listen to all 2,000 songs on their iPods. Having the iPod is the point. Likewise, placing a call on your iPhone is mostly about the pleasure of state-of-the-art, since any phone will do.

Unless content undergoes some sort of revolutionary change - and what is there, really, beyond text, sound and imagery? - technology will continue to generate most of the excitement, and attract most of the creative energies of our best and brightest.

As for the idea that content is itself magically transformed by its interaction with newer, faster ways of displaying and multiplying same - well, this is the sort of dizzy talk designed to make us look upon Steve Jobs with awe. You could argue that iPhones and X-Boxes and Nomads have turned content into a mere commodity - just more stuff to put in the pipeline - but I don't think that's what the bards of tech-topia had in mind.

Or maybe it is. The inventors of these media toys might be perfectly happy with all the world's musicians, novelists, filmmakers and videogame code-writers just toiling away in their fields, producing raw material for technology's greater glory.

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So I'm at the Poorhouse in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday, St. Patty's Day, and watching The Freakin Hott throw down without a bass player, and yet I can swear that I'm hearing bass. This, I thought, is a miracle of room noise. Can organized low notes just magically form from the residue of guitars, drums and vocals? Have groups such as The Freakin Hott and, of course, White Stripes, found the secret to spontaneous bass?

I ran these ideas by a drinking buddy of mine, and pretty much at the top of my lungs, it being a noisy and crowded bar on a night of drinking occasion. He looked at me sympathetically.

"Actually," he said, "it's a pedal."

A pedal. It turns out that The Freakin' Hott guitarist Aaron Gentry is, technically speaking, also the Hott's bassist. He plays both with help from an effects pedal that indirectly gives a bass boost to his guitar lines. He runs the guitar through three amplifiers at once to tease out the different frequencies, and the pedal switches between the amplifiers, in different combinations of one, two or three, depending on how much high, middle or low Gentry wants.

And this audio manipulation works: The Freakin Hott's snarly, snarky roadhouse rock has as much bass as it needs, and as little. I'm not saying bass players are superfluous -- that conversation has already taken place, and the White Stripes' biggest hit is built on a bass line. But it's interesting to see a band willing to question rock orthodoxy -- thou shalt recruit a bassist -- and have the skill to defend its low end theory every time out.

Did I mention it's a pedal?

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