It all sounds like a lot of fun, and it is, starting with the lively Flash-adorned site and indeed making simple composing extraordinarily accessible in a synesthetic "paint-by-numbers" model. But is this the Record Plant of the future or just a musical stepping stone for do-it-yourself musicians?

David Danon, CEO of mH2O.com, right now emphasizes the latter, with the pro stuff coming as the next logical step:

"We are the first collaborative community in the world that allows anyone, regardless of ability, to make music. It allows people to make music, paint it, as if you were painting on a canvas or piece of paper - as easily as that you can change keys, create your own community based on the music you like, and of course find other people to play music with on the Internet without any kind of knowledge of music itself."

That's only the seductive beginning of bigger things to come - like Digidesign's ProTools suite, the heart of most professional recording studios. That's the pricey stuff I still can't afford, mentioned earlier.

"We've spoken to Digidesign, looked at ProTools," says Danon, "and we'll probably get the cheapest version, ProLite, and buy a large enough number of licenses where you can drop the price so that people can just lease it monthly. That's where the market is going. Right now our endeavor is to build the easiest way of making music possible, which is why we've chosen the tools from Sonic Foundry, our first partner. We want to expand our suite of software to include more complicated programs and possibly even simpler programs. But for now the main focus is to create a platform which everyone agrees is the standard. For that, painting music is the easiest thing to get every consumer in the world interested in. From there they will want to develop multitrack recording using a variety of effects depending on the event, and then of course we'll beef up our offerings."

This seems to be in the model of moving software from a PC-installed base to something you access on the Internet, something AOL and Microsoft are eagerly gearing up for. So is Danon, whose first step in that direction works even without broadband:

"We're very excited about the fact that we're circumventing most bandwidth requirements today that would be impinged on by large .wav files or even large MP3 files by using the concept of samples and loops. We feel it has been one of the most underutilized concepts on the Web in terms of creating content."

But that's a lead-in to - what else - broadband, convergence, et al:

"At the end of the day, what we're doing really applies itself to the next revolution of the Internet, which is broadband and wireless," boasts Danon. "As much as you can horse around on a PC with 56k, in a few years you'll be able to do what we're talking about musically in real-time streams in broadband and in a couple of years you'll even be able to use your cell phone to bring up samples which you can then download from our site, sing into your telephone a la karaoke style and then send it off as an MP3."

"We're going to make partnerships in the next year that will make us the place to go to make music, whether you're an amateur or a professional," predicts the compose-by-numbers entrepreneur.

The final upshot? This is a great site with a great concept. I won't be doing any 5.1 surround multitrack mixes there for a while, but the chances of that day arriving soon, at a price I can easily afford, are good indeed.