Ever since Steve Jobs bluntly admitted that Apple's impending $250 million quarterly loss was due in part to the way in which Apple "completely missed the boat" on CD-RW drives, we've been wondering exactly what he meant when he said that the problem "will be fixed soon." Obviously that implies that at least some Macs will sport CD-RW drives in the relatively near future, but with Apple, the hardware is only half of the equation. In fact, we've always assumed that one reason why Apple never included CD-RW drives in shipping Macs is because they aren't exactly the easiest things to use.

We know, we know, it's not rocket science, but writing data to recordable CD media still isn't quite as straightforward or as forgiving as just dragging a bunch of files to a disk in the Finder. Several viewers tell us that fresh advances in the field are changing that (especially on the Windows side, unfortunately), but until recently, burning a CD meant getting all your files arranged ahead of time, and then sending everything to the recorder in a single uninterrupted stream. While software like Toast does an admirable job of making this process as simple as possible, there's always room for improvement. And that's where Apple comes in.

Faithful viewer David Triska notes that AppleInsider is on a tear lately, with updates posted three days in a row following its unexplained six-week hiatus. We all knew that Apple's box office smash iMovie was just the first in a series, and AppleInsider's latest report discusses the company's next effort, which is currently in production. Apparently Apple's genetic engineers are working to splice the DNA of MP3 playing software together with the CD-burning genes they secretly acquired from Radialogic a few days ago, resulting in a recombinant beast that the company hopes will be another killer app: iMusic.

Yes, just as iMovie brought moviemaking magic to the masses, iMusic strives to let Mac users create their own custom audio CDs from MP3 files with a minimum of muss and fuss. Assuming that Apple's lab rats can whip the mutant into a publicly-showable state in time, expect DJ Jazzy Steve to take iMusic for a spin during his upcoming Macworld Expo keynote. But whereas iMovie marked the onset of the consumer desktop video revolution, will iMusic really draw the crowds? After all, burning music CDs isn't exactly ground-breaking, earth-shattering stuff. And what about an easy way to make data CDs and backups? Here's hoping that iMusic is just one prong of Apple's writeable media strategy. (Given that Apple's still sitting on that DVD-mastering software it bought from Astarte last April, we don't doubt it for a second.)