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This is a game site, right? I figured I was getting a game. I loaded it and tried to see what I could do with it. I pressed a few buttons. "Boop. Budd. Budd. Boop." No, I tried but couldn't get the "Ka-twing!" I turned to the age-old Confucian wisdom, "When in doubt, refer to manual." The manual had repeated pages — 1 through 6, and the corresponding 41 — 46 on the other side — which mean I was missing pages 12 pages of instruction. Doh! I tried the official web-site to see if I could download a manual or if there were help tips. It wasn't much help, at all. Two hours later, I did determine one thing, Traxxpad is not a game. It's a piece of beat-making and mixing audio software. Much like the 1001 other ones out there, except that it's extremely portable being made for the PSP. I also figured that I'm an idiot since I couldn't for the life of me, figure out how to use this thing properly.

I recruited a recording engineer friend to help me review this. To give me a better idea of how this piece of software compares to others out there.

"It's like any other mixing software out there," she said. "You spend two hours learning how to use it and it is no better or worse. It's nice that it's portable, but it saves in MP3 format."

She used a lot more unkind words and I bought her lunch and a latte. Okay, so I wasn't that stupid. It was that difficult to learn and the interface was really that unintuitive — it took me way too long to actually get to the various modules when I started trying to figure it out. In checking other reviews out there already, it seems that the problem in the manual wasn't just a fluke in mine.

That said however, Traxxpad is surprisingly powerful for what it is. It has a ton of sound samples — over 1,000 is advertised (none of them of very high quality, my friend imparted). If you have a microphone for the PSP, you can also record your own sound samples. There are four modes that you can work in to create your own beats.

Real-Time Interactive Sequencing Technology (R-TIST) allows you to create beat patterns in real time (by pressing buttons) or one step at a time by placing the notes sequentially by hand. This module is also where you edit your compositions. They can be saved as single tracks (single channel loops) or as sequences (8-channel loops).

MELOD (which I surmise is short for melody) allows you to change notes using a key-board like interface, for properties such pitch, sustain length, volume etc.

And finally, Studio Through a Console (or STAC) mode allows users to put the compositions you made in RTIST together into a complex melody.

MYxxer is your jam session. It allows you to load two sequences from R-TIST and play a background beat to freestyle over, switch between the sequences and load entire R-TIST tracks onto buttons for looping and triggering independently.

There are also the Recorder, the Chop Shop and the Combiner. The Recorder is obvious, the Chop Shop is the sample editor and the Combiner allows you to mix sounds. That is to say, combine up to 4 sounds together. It allows you to edit the volume and pitch attribute of each sound relative to the mix, preview the new sound, save it and export it. However, you start by selecting a sound that this new sound will replace. For the life of me, I couldn't find a way to first duplicate the sound so I would still have the original sound.

If Traxxpad is a toy, it's surprisingly powerful for the $40 price tag. You can make some serious ringtones with it after you figure out how to use it. For a serious musician, it has a number of draw backs. There's a major waste of screen space — skins filled with fancy non-functional graphics. You can only sample via the mike (which you have to buy, the PSP doesn't have a built-in mike), there's no Undo — which had me totally mystified — and no ability to save to MIDI files.

I'll expand on this last a bit. As a portable tool, my recording engineer friend was intrigued until she found that that there was no way to save the beat sequence in MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) format, an industry standard interchange format for music, or even as a plain .WAV file. You see, for a professional musician, especially a starving fresh-out-of-school musician working on her music career only in the evenings and weekends, the idea of having such a powerful suite of tools to maybe do some work during a morning commute or a lunch break was very attractive. If you can then export it into the pro-application, on Windows or a Mac and do the editing there, that's a great angle. However, the MP3 format which Traxxpad does support is a lossy format. That is to say, a compressed format with data stripped out.

Finally, she told me that quantization was always on. I asked for elaboration. Quantization is keeping to a beat. So that if you don't press the button just that precise moment, Traxxpad automatically shifts that beat to the next beat "gridline." What's so bad about that, I asked.

"It's set to quarter beats. 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 or 1/32. You can't program off beats or triplets."

Doh! So, there we go. Toy to create beats, ring tones and share them on MySpace? Nice once you figure out how to use it. Professional musician's tool? Okay if you're a Hip-Hop DJ and just need beat sequences and MP3 is good enough. Anything more than that? Back to the drawing board, my friend.