Cakewalk is a company based in Boston, Massachusetts that
develops music software. Their best known product is the music
sequencer SONAR, which is quite comprehensive and designed for use
by professionals. SONAR incorporates multi-track recording and
editing of both audio and MIDI. However, the company offers a full
range of software products, including the Project5--a soft-synth
studio, and Dimension Pro a virtual instrument.
SONAR creates projects that allow the operator to edit MIDI files,
raw audio tracks, and other associated information like lyrics, and
to present them in a range of formats including musical scores,
editing console, event lists, etc. The operator can also mix the
various tracks down into a stereo .WAV format ready to be saved on
a CD.
While MIDI is a fairly ubiquitous standard for representation of
digital music, there is no broadly accepted standard for the
interchange of projects between SONAR and other competing
recording/editing software (e.g see Cubase). i.e. one can't easily
import a Cubase recording in its native format into SONAR and vice
versa.
Project5 is a host application for software synthesizers. In
Project5 version 2 Cakewalk introduced audio recording capabilities
and a "Groove Matrix" which allows live performance of groove clips
(either audio or MIDI). Project5 has a fantastic user interface for
dealing with MIDI and is an open platform for hosting hundreds of
commercial and free software synthesizers. A very helpful user
community has formed around Project5 in the Cakewalk online forums
and have even begun a popular Project5 Wiki.
Originally, back in the 1980s and in the 1990s, the company was
named Twelve Tone Systems, Inc. and Cakewalk was the name of their
flagship MIDI sequencer, first for DOS and since 1991 for Windows
3.0. Early versions of Cakewalk for DOS (up to 3.0) required the
intelligent mode of the MPU-401 card and could not be used with
today's clones, while later versions (since 4.0) relied on dumb
UART mode only. Cakewalk was renamed Cakewalk Pro at some point,
and later into Cakewalk Pro Audio when support for digitized audio
was added.
Cakewalk
Website
