Having gotten involved with the audio pre and post production scene in mid 1998 I looked around and tested a couple of different production applications. When I tried Cakewalk it took 4 attempts at installing before it would work (I later discovered it has issues with some sound cards. As features go it has assorted abilities that are great, score editing, mixing etc. the best feature in this entire program is the virtual piano. which makes writing scores a snap...if it works. When I tried to upgrade it I ended up having to just uninstall 7 and just install 8 fresh, not very pleasant. Going on to other software seemed the smartest way to go. I wanted to make sure I had the right program for me. Which brought me to Cubase VST (http://www.steinberg.net) . It has all of the features as cakewalk with the exception of the virtual keyboard. Lacking that the ease of use and incredible flexiblity of cubase is incredible. If you use another Steinberg product called Rebirth (it emulates the old roland 303 bass-synth and 808/909 drum machines) you can actually load individual tracks in rebirth as separate midi tracks in cubase on the fly which allows you to add post-editing effects while changing parts/melodies in realtime. In addition to all of this VSt also uses VST plugins that anyone can write. Basically they are little effects such as grungelizer which adds a distortion/fuzz sound to your track. You can also easily add quadraphonic panning to any track separately or grouped. Cakewalk has a lot of these features, but Cubase is more often chosen by large name producers/ composers. The Beastie Boys, Brian Eno, Stewart Copland, bjork and others are all happy Cubase users. As am I.
For Amatuer usage cakewalk is fairly inexpensive and is easy to use but for advanced and very versatile music editing/engineering look no further than Cubase.



Recommended: Yes