Cakewalk Pro Audio 8.0

With this much experience on the MIDI scene, it's no surprise that Cakewalk's MIDI editing capabilities are awesome. Her audio side, however, has traditionally been solid and functional, but a bit limited. Audio-only packages like SAWPro and Digidesign's Session offered more in the way of audio mixing and effects. With Cakewalk Pro Audio 8.0, however, both these areas have been vastly improved, and CPA can now really claim to be a complete recording workshop. This fine product is appropriate not only for musicians and recording engineers, but also for game developers, Web audio producers, and video post-production.

New Goodies in CPA 8.0…

One major area of improvement is the onscreen mixer, or "console view." Previously just a curiosity, it now actually works most of the time, allowing you to save a fully automated mix as part of a work file. The software sliders work with little latency, and you can flip back and forth from the console window to the track view window while a piece is playing. You can mix and match audio and MIDI tracks as you like, and customize the layout of the on-screen mixer. MIDI tracks can only be controlled if your MIDI module responds to MIDI volume commands, which many do not. Most of us will still be using our trusty analog mixers for a while yet, but the day of all-digital software mixdowns is coming. By the way, the audio meters are greatly improved.

Both MIDI and audio effects can be added non-destructively in real time from the console view, or as a destructive edit in one of the edit views. Adding effects to an audio track is easy. Each channel has a space referred to as the effects patch point. Right-clicking here brings up a menu of the effects available. Parametric EQ, reverb, delay, chorus, flange, pitch-shift and time/pitch stretch are available out of the box, and Cakewalk supports third-party plug-ins using Microsoft's DirectX technology. Once you've "patched" an effect into a channel, you can double-click on it to adjust the parameters for the effect. We found the parameters adjustable in real time with little latency, and they sound pretty darn good. Real-time effects do suck up a lot of CPU power, so you'll probably have to be sparing with them.

MIDI effects are an interesting new feature. Want to add a delay effect, such as chorus or reverb, to a MIDI track? This can be done by simply delaying the MIDI track, instead of adding the effect to the audio track at mixdown. Obviously MIDI effects are far less resource-intensive than audio effects, and in some ways more flexible. MIDI chorus and reverb can be added from the console view by adjusting two onscreen sliders.

Cakewalk now supports 18-, 20-, 22- and 24-bit Audio, as well as the traditional 16-bit variety. Five different sampling rates are supported: 11025 Hz, 22050 Hz, 44100 Hz, 48000 Hz, and 9100%0 Hz. Of course, you can only use bit depths and sample rates that are supported by your audio hardware, and the bit depth and sample rate must remain the same for a particular project. It's beginning to look as if 24-bit, 96 kHz will be the new standard for a while, so it's good to know that Cakewalk won't hold you back.

CPA 8.0 features vastly improved video capabilities. You can now include AVI, MPEG, or QuickTime video in your project, and the video will be shown in real time as your project plays. Syncing music and digitized sound to video is easy. Although AVI, MPEG, or QuickTime video files can be imported, only AVI can be exported (Cakewalk can sync with other software such as Premiere, to export audio to other video formats).

Web developers will be pleased to learn that Cakewalk can export audio to RealAudio files, and audio and MIDI to RealMedia files. When you export, you can specify all the parameters that a RealAudio file can take, like Title, Author Name, and Selective Record (enables the user to save the file to a hard drive).

…and One Baddie

There's a bug in Cakewalk 8.0 which may prevent some users from printing out scores. Apparently Cakewalk can't coexist peacefully with some font management software, and has some conflicts with the way Windows 98 handles fonts. If you have a font manager (like Adobe Type Manager or FontMinder) installed on your system, or even if you simply have a "large number of fonts" on your system, then Cakewalk will be unable to load the musical symbol font that's used in the Staff view. According to Cakewalk tech support, there's no solution to this problem at the moment. Although you can still use the Staff view to edit, the notes will appear as unattractive squares rather than as the usual golf clubs, and clefs, key and time signatures will not be displayed (or printed). Also, every time you start Cakewalk, a dialog box pops up advising you that the font can't be loaded, which requires an aggravating extra keystroke to start the program.

What can Cakewalk do for you?

Cakewalk lets you record as many MIDI and digital audio tracks as your hardware will allow (up to 256), and they will play back in perfect sync. You can perform a wide variety of editing on both MIDI and audio. A CPA-equipped PC can be used as a multitrack, a mixdown deck, or both, and you can output to external sound gear, or to a .WAV file.

This is a very full-featured program. Over the years, Cakewalk has accumulated an amazing number of editing tools for both MIDI and digital audio. Naturally you can cut, copy and paste in a variety of ways. There is also a very robust multi-level Undo feature. MIDI edit commands include Quantize, Groove Quantize, Transpose, Invert, Retrograde, Prepare Breakfast (almost)… In fact, each of these commands opens a dialog box with several parameters that can be set, allowing very complex editing. In the unlikely event that you can't do what you want with one of the editing commands, there is CAL, the Cakewalk Application Language. If you're ween enough, you can use this language to write your own scripts and perform any sort of edit you can imagine. Audio editing options include a noise gate, a graphic EQ, a parametric EQ, a volume envelope, Normalize (maximizes level without clipping), and of course, Reverse for those psychedelic backwards sounds.

With so many accumulated features, there's always a danger of the screen becoming too cluttered, but Cakewalk has done a good job with the user interface, which is reasonably intuitive, flexible and customizable. While some of the more complex editing operations require some manual-reading, the most frequently-used tasks are simple enough, and can usually be performed in more than one way. Unlike some other programs I could name, Cakewalk avoids superfluous dialog boxes and mouse-only operations. To play a selection, simply hit the spacebar. Hit it again to stop, then a third time to play again. Recording is as simple as selecting a track and pressing record.

Cakewalk provides several different ways to view musical data. The main window is the Track View, which displays an overview of your piece. The left pane of this window shows your music as linear tracks, like on a tape recorder. Individual tracks can be muted or soloed in real time, and any track can be routed to any input or output, including multiple ports. The right pane, or Clips pane, shows the music as "clips", which may be any length, allowing non-linear editing. Clips, which may contain either MIDI or audio data, may be dragged around with the mouse, combined, split, cut, copied and pasted. For more precise editing operations, one or more tracks at a time may be displayed in one of the edit views.

Cakewalk has several edit views, so you can choose whichever one is most convenient for a specific task, or simply the one you prefer to work in. The most basic is Event List view, which displays MIDI data as a text list, like a musical spreadsheet. For each event, the program shows the time (in both SMPTE time values and measure/beat/tick values), channel, type and other appropriate values such as note numbers and velocities. To change any field, simply position the cursor on it and move the mouse or type in a value. This is the only view in which all types of events are displayed.

In Piano Roll view, the notes are displayed as horizontal bars on a kind of graph. The vertical position of the bar indicates the pitch, and the length of the bar indicates the duration of the note. This view provides a quick and intuitive way to make changes to individual notes. Grab a note with the mouse and move it up or down to a different pitch, or stretch the note to make it longer or shorter.

The Staff view allows you to see a MIDI track (or tracks) in standard musical notation, and edit MIDI data by moving notes around on staves. Cakewalk is not a notation program, and the options for printing out musical scores are very limited. Also, as described above, a serious bug makes printing scores impossible for most Windows 98 users at the moment.

Controllers View displays only MIDI Continuous Controller messages. When a continuous controller such as a pitch wheel is used, it generates a slew of messages in rapid succession. If you're trying to edit notes, all these controller messages will get in your way, so it is convenient to be able to edit this information separately.

The big news over in the Audio View is the effects (see above), which can be applied to selected sections of audio here, or in real time in Console View. However, there are also several handy new features. You can create volume and pan envelopes, use a snap-to feature that will force selected sections to snap to either a grid or to the nearest zero crossing, and of course zoom, scrub and set very sophisticated markers as always. Also handy is a little arrow button that lets you move from track to track without leaving Audio View.

The Virtual Piano is a tool that lets you enter notes using your mouse or computer keyboard. A graphic piano keyboard appears on screen, and the notes you peck in can trigger your sound device and/or be recorded in Cakewalk. Handy for composers who get a sudden inspiration while traveling with their laptop. Another handy tool is the Virtual Jukebox, which lets you create a list of tunes to be played in any order you choose. You can move tunes around in the order while another tune is playing, so this could be used for live performance (although we certainly don't condone such practices).

Cakewalk is very customizable. You can design the views to look the way you want them, and save common setups as template files. You can directly edit the initialization files within the program, and even change the color scheme.

Input and Output

The heart of a Cakewalk project is the "work" file (.wrk), which contains audio and MIDI tracks, mixing console information, and system settings. Cakewalk can open MIDI (.mid) files and Wave (.wav) files, inserting them into a Work file, but no other audio formats can be imported. The work file, of course, refers to various wave files, which Cakewalk manages for you behind the scenes - it keeps track of which wave files are needed for Work files, and you can periodically delete those that are no longer referenced by any file. To back up a project, you can save it as a "bundle" file (.bun), which saves the work file and all associated files in one package.

CPA can export an entire project or any selected part thereof as an audio file. Four formats are supported - Wave (.wav), Video for Windows (.avi), RealAudio (.ra), and RealMedia (includes RealAudio and MIDI data in a streaming format).

A handy new mixdown feature lets you mix selected tracks down to one (or two) tracks, which adds a lot of flexibility. To mix down your entire MIDI-and-audio composition, however, there's still only one way to do it - out to a mixer and back again. See our Audio FAQ for details.

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