In 1999, Codemasters released MTV Music Generator for the original PlayStation. For its time, it was a remarkably robust music-editing app that turned a small cadre of gamers into amateur techno artists overnight. Yes, the interface was clunky, there was no support for recording samples and the PlayStation's 2 MB of onboard memory severely limited compositional options, but it proved that video game consoles had potential beyond serving up another helping of leggy adventuresses and ravenous zombie hordes. Codemasters has released a few follow-ups since then, but there's a new kid on the block that's poised to blow them all away. Its name is Traxxpad: Portable Studio, and it absolutely lives up to its name.

There are four main modes in Traxxpad. If you're not satisfied with the more than 1,000 samples in the Traxxpad library, you can create your own by using the Real-Time Interactive Sequencing Technology (R-TIST, get it?). Despite the name, you can either place sounds in real-time by pressing buttons, or you can place each note individually in sequence by hand. Samples can be further edited in the MeLOD editor, a channel editor that displays one channel at a time and can be used to adjust the pitch, volume and balance of single notes in the channel.

Next, it's time to head over to STAC, the Studio Through a Console, and sequence the samples as you see fit. If you just want to play around with the samples, there's a stripped-down version of STAC called the MyXxer, where you can play samples live and test them out. And once you have a song recorded, you can trade it with other Traxxpad users by sending it over an ad hoc Wi-Fi connection.

But the killer app in Traxxpad isn't its sample library or sequencing abilities. It's its ability to export your songs as MP3s to any computer or gadget capable of reading a Memory Stick Duo. As far as we can recall, there has never been a game console music-editing application that supports this kind of functionality. If you wanted to get your Music Generator songs off of your PlayStation, you had to run the PS audio cables into an external recorder. And even that only got you an analog transfer in real-time, not to mention the mess and fuss of disconnecting and reconnecting wires.