Beaterator Review

Beaterator is not a game. There is not a princess waiting for you at a castle, there is no invincibility code and there are no one shot kills. Beaterator is a serious application for mixing and remixing beats. If you have ever dabbled with Garageband in iLife for Mac, this is similar, albeit on a smaller screen, with funky controls, and a limited scope —or highly focused scope, take your pick. Are you feeling crafty and creative today? Are you into beats? Do you like projects? Maybe Beaterator is for you.

Beaterator is a serious application. It does not fall into the category of game as there is no story to follow or story based objectives. There are no clans, factions, races, or enemies. There are just beats. As soon as you fire up your UMD, a computer animated Timbaland brings you up to speed on what Beaterator is and a general explanation of how it works. There are more in-depth movie tutorials throughout the “game” and these are all colorful and effective. Soon after the opening movie you come to a selection screen with two options: Live Play and Studio.

Live Play stars animated Timbaland as the DJ and you select the beats he will mix. You select from 8 instruments: drums, bass, key, synth, bongos, drums 2, trumpet, and vocals. Each instrument has 4 loops mapped to the X, triangle, circle, and square buttons which start or stop the loop. You can mix loops here instantly by starting and stopping loops and by switching between instruments on the fly. You can also replace any loop with any of the numerous audio recordings found in the UMD. In Live Play you can record and replay your mixes, save your songs or load songs included in the disk. You can also switch immediately to the Studio mode.

In Studio mode, things get significantly more complicated. You are immediately presented with a mixing board of sorts and you will be asked if you would like to see a help video, which you can opt out of. Studio is comprised of two sub modes, Studio Session and Song Crafter. Studio Session offers the user a granular level of control over sounds and loops. This is the mode you will be using to create sounds for your grand composition. You can create your own sounds using a melody editor or a drum editor to simulate real instruments. You can load an existing loop and edit that if you like. For the most creative, you can record your own sounds with a microphone. If you have a PSP 3000 or a PSP Go, you can finally make use of that built in microphone but you 1000 and 2000 model owners will have to get an add-on microphone.

Once you have created a loop you can bring it into the Song Crafter to further refine your sound and piece weave it into a song. Song Crafter presents you with system of tracks wherein you lay down loops in any sequence you like to create beats. You add tracks in order to add other loops and create more beats. Within this mode you can enter the Sound Edit screen and edit fade-outs, fade-ins, stretch the audio, reverse the audio, cut sections out, and several other edits. Additionally, you can add effects such as reverb, delay, and distortion in the Effects Editor screen. Finally, once you have completed your masterful symphony, you can export your song to an MIDI file or a WAV file. The WAV file, a very large file, will play natively through the PSP’s XMB and can be transferred to a computer or an MP3 player of whatever flavor.

Exporting your first Beaterator masterpiece will be a long journey fraught with many trials and tribulations. The first trial you will face is becoming comfortable with the inner workings of Beaterator. The game does feature numerous video tutorials available to you when you stumble upon the many features in Beaterator and they explain said features in great depth. You can later access these tutorials through the menu available through the R button. Beaterator also includes a reference guide and glossary. Additionally, every option and button is accompanied by a brief description of its function under the main screen. Unfortunately, there isn’t a step by step tutorial to guide you through creating your first loop or your first song. Once you’re done watching the tutorials, you are on your own.

Beaterator is very much like full music creation applications available on PCs but with a streamlined interface. I use the word streamlined loosely here as I really mean to convey that the screen is often focused on one task at hand, with the entire screen devoted to one level of control at a time. With such a small screen dedicated to such a large application, a great amount of effort is devoted to figuring out what screen will produce the results you desire. Also, there are no visual cues to indicate what effects have been applied to a loop, a track, or an entire song; to see them you must first locate the appropriate screen where these effects are applied. The small screen of a portable device is just not suited for this sort of advanced application.

Beaterator is not a game. It is a very serious, very capable, and very complex piece of software for creating music. There are some serous limitations brought about by the type of hardware it is running on. I never encountered slow down except when loading from the UMD. Of course, Beaterator is simply not about frame rates or animations. Beaterator is an application more akin to Garageband on a Mac than it is to any game on the PSP. It requires a great amount of time and dedication to produce music through it, far more than any RPG on the system. The portable screen of the PSP is far less than the ideal environment for such fine granular controls.

How much you can get out of Beaterator certainly depends on whether you can dedicate the time, patience, and creativity required to create music. The lack of an idiot’s guide to Beaterator definitely leaves you to your own devices. You may find yourself watching the tutorial videos more than once and it certainly would not hurt if you were a greatly self motivated person. You definitely will need to spend more than a train ride with Beaterator if you want to get results. In the end though, you may feel a deep sense of accomplishment for having created your very own song. Too bad PSP does not offer trophy support to show off. Of course, you can always publish your songs to the Beaterator website. If you would like to distribute your song to your friends, you will have to transfer that big WAV file to a computer and burn it onto a CD or find an application that will convert a WAV into a friendly MP3 (think iTunes).

I cannot come to a conclusion as to who could really benefit from Beaterator. There are many programs on Windows and Mac that can do this very same job with less frustration and more options. Perhaps if I were a kid this would be my gateway to the music production industry. After all, a computer with comparable software is more expensive than a PSP with Beaterator. There is a great amount of knowledge one can acquire through Beaterator and Beaterator could serve as a stepping stone before graduating to a more advance setup like a PC. Beaterator is available on UMD and on the PlayStation Store for $39.99 at the time of this writing. Beaterator will also be appearing on the iPhone and iPod Touch but the date of availability and price are not yet available.