Because home video is relatively easy to edit and manipulate, there have already been homebrewed reedited versions of Steven Spielberg's AI (producing a fan-created version felt to be more in keeping with Stanley Kubrick's original vision for the film) and George Lucas' limp 1999 Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace. As England's Guardian wrote in 2002, "Directors have been sent a clear message by movie fans: if your film doesn't meet our expectations, we'll re-cut it until it does."

Acid Reign

But it's home music that has become rapidly, and stunningly open-ended. Back in 1979, avant-garde musician Brian Eno, who has produced the Talking Heads and U2, and released his own numerous solo and soundtrack albums, said:

As soon as you record something, you make it available for any situation that has a record player. You take it out of the ambience and locale in which it was made, and it can be transposed into any situation. This morning I was listening to a Thai lady singing; I can hear the sound of the St. Sophia Church in Belgrade or Max's Kansas City in my own apartment, and I can listen with a fair degree of conviction about what these sounds mean. As Marshall McLuhan said, it makes all music all present. So not only is the whole history of our music with us now, in some sense, on record, but the whole global musical culture is also available.

In 1998, Sonic Foundry (since purchased by Sony Pictures Digital, Inc.) released their extremely popular Acid recording system. Acid uses "loops", actually short bits of computerized audio, typically one to four bars in length, whose pitch and tempo can be raised and lowered, so that drum track that was recorded at say, 120 beats a minute, can play at 100 beats a minute. Or a vocal passage pitched in E can be raised up F sharp or down to D flat.

And Acid has released dozens of "loop libraries"-instrument specific CDROMs chock full of short musical phrases, which can be combined with both other loop libraries, and parts played by a home musician.

There's a growing number of respected, and in some cases, even household name musicians, who are signing deals with Acid to release loop libraries of their own performances. Perhaps the most famous is Mick Fleetwood, the drummer who co-founded the perennially bestselling Fleetwood Mac. Acid released a CDROM full of Fleetwood's drumming, which was specially recorded just for that purpose, over a period of about three days.