At last month's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Harmonix invited a handful of journalists to its suite at the W Hotel to check out its long-awaited in-game store for Rock Band. Until now, players have had to use the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Playstation Store to purchase new tracks and song packs for the hit game. No longer. Harmonix has officially announced an update that will offer you what we were shown: a music store that is fully integrated into the game itself. The Rock Band music store will let you listen to audio previews of each available track, which means no more searching YouTube to figure out if a song you've never heard is worth your hard-earned Microsoft Points dollars. You'll also be able to check out the album artwork that accompanies each track; see a nine-point scale difficulty rating for each part (guitar, drums, vocals, bass and overall); and sort songs by multiple categories, including genre.

We were suitably impressed by this much-needed improvement. (See below for screenshots of the interface.) With a current catalog of just over 125 songs both on the disc and available for download through the store, Harmonix's interface makes zipping through its song library a snap. That said, we're not convinced that it will suffice when the database hits 1,250 songs, 12,500 songs, or 125,000 songs. On a computer, text searches are an effective way to navigate large databases of content. The same could be said for consoles, but on-screen keyboards quickly become annoying after an extended period of use, and not everyone is going to buy a wireless keyboard or keypad attachment. That's why we've long believed that speaker-independent voice command will be required as the amount of content on consumer electronics devices like consoles and personal video recorders grows. And based on conversations we've had with folks at Harmonix, it wouldn't surprise us at all to discover that they're investigating the possibility of such a solution.

The store is not the only feature in this Rock Band update. Other features include:

*Harmonix has increased the number of fans that players can earn at the Easy, Medium and Hard settings. This will let Easy gamers cross the Atlantic Ocean; Medium gamers will get to play at more venues; Hard gamers will finally be able to make like Bon Jovi by seeing a million faces and rocking them all with the One Million Fans achievement.

*Band World Tour has been improved to cut down on the amount of times a particular song appears on various set lists

*Better phoneme recognition and detection for those hard to nail vocals

*Reduced microphone latency for the PS3 version of Rock Band

*Xbox 360 parental controls no longer blocks band logos from being seen on Xbox Live

*Shorter load times for downloadable content

Finally, what announcement would be complete without a little bragging? Harmonix has also announced that it has sold six million downloadable tracks. We know what Jerry Lee Lewis would say about that. As promised, see below for screenshots of the Rock Band Xbox 360 music store.

 The Rock Band 360 store front menu

 The Rock Band 360 song list menu

 A Rock Band 360 individual song page 

For exclusive screenshots of the PS3 version of the Rock Band in-game music store, click here.