Beaterator

Once you're happy it's time to record your Live Play creation and start mucking about with it in the Studio Session. This is where things start to get more complicated. Instead of the cartoon Timbaland, the various soundbanks are displayed across a grid as coloured bars. You can play, edit or remove loops, cut and paste sections, add in new sounds and so on. Surrounding the grid are knobs and dials used for things like adjusting the volume of individual tracks and changing the BPM.

"The best way to think about Studio Session is as a more robust, more sophisticated version of the Live Play mode," says the Rockstar chap. "We start to give you more options to play around with here, but not the full extent of what Beaterator offers."

If the full extent is what you're after, Song Crafter mode is the answer. This is where you get to create your own individual sounds. You can make small adjustments to the loops that are provided for you or design brand new ones from scratch. There's a feature called Melody Maker that allows you to create melodies using a full keyboard and synth editor. There's also a Drum Crafter for making your own beats, with a huge selection of different sounds and rhythms to choose from. Those who are serious about their music-making could spend hours rejigging and fine-tuning their tracks here.

When the rejigging and fine-tuning is finally over it's time to share your genius with the world. Songs created using Beaterator can be exported as a WAV file to your phone or Facebook profile. Alternatively you can share them via the Rockstar Social Club, just as it's possible to share videos made using the GTA IV PC editor. There are plans to hold competitions and set up a scoring system so users can rate each others' songs.

The idea, the Rockstar man explains, is to create an online community for budding musicians. "In an ideal world there will be thousands, if not millions of potential Timbalands out there, making that the start of their career," he says. But is Beaterator sophisticated enough to produce professional-quality music? If it's not a videogame, what is it? A toy or a tool?

"We're trying to hit two opposing spectrums," says Mr Rockstar. "Some people will have used music sequencing software before, serious stuff that costs hundreds of pounds - those people will want to jump in and go straight to the Song Crafter. At the same time, we want to reach people who may never have made music before, and take them through the whole process in a really fun, intuitive way."

Which is where the Live Play mode comes in, and why Rockstar has worked so hard to make Beaterator accessible. That doesn't mean it's just for amateurs, though. "In terms of whether it's a game or a serious piece of software, it's definitely the latter. That's how we're positioning it, that's how we feel about it and hopefully that's being reflected in what we've shown so far," says the Rockstar man.

Whatever it may be, Beaterator certainly marks a different direction for Rockstar - while simultaneously being unmistakeable as a Rockstar product. Only the producer of the world's most successful videogames could design a music creation tool this slick, sharp and downright cool, and get the producer of the world's most successful records involved to boot. You never know, they might have to put up an extra shelf.