Studio mode is more clinical than the Live Play mode. It's almost sterile. While it does afford you some powerful music-crafting muscles, the clunky interface and long load times stifles the creative process. If you're looking for something that will help you instantly capture those creative bursts for posterity, this is not your tool. You can input everything note by note, it may take forever but at least you'll get it right.

As far as professional sounds go, the loops are every bit as good as you are likely to hear in ambient music, where the quality of the sounds aren't necessarily important depending on how they are used. What you are most unlikely to use are the instrument patches. Without getting too technical, suffice it to say that only a few notes of each instrument will actually sound like the instrument it's named after. The rest of the notes are just sped up or slowed down to the appropriate pitch.

Still, there might be a particular novelty sound that appeals to you. All of the sounds, and your songs, can be output as wav files. So you can essentially share them on the net or even make a CD if you have the appropriate software. That's another handy feature.

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Beaterator is not perfect, it's got a ways to go but the potential that it displays is incredible. It won't be long until you can have a professional recording studio and tone generator in the palm of your hand. For the time being, Beaterator is the closest you're going to get, and it's pretty damn close.

By Cole Smith
CCC Senior Writer