MORE BASS FOR YOUR BUCK

Like many of you, I’ve been a long-time user of Cakewalk music production software. During the past few years the program’s just been getting better and better with each new release. The latest bundle, Cakewalk Pro Suite, includes Sonar 7, Project5 and the company’s two award’ winning software synthesizers, Rapture and Dimension Pro.

While there isn’t enough space in this review to showcase the full-range of this package, it is worth mentioning that this is the first time Cakewalk decided to bring down the prices enough to fit them all into one release.

This is Cakewalk’s flagship DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software. You can record, edit, notate, effect and mix your music or post-production efforts in this all-in-one environment. It has a solid 64-bit engine and works in XP, XP x64 and Vista. This release also has some handy new mastering plug-ins, such as External Insert, which allows you to insert and mix external hardware effects and instruments with automatic delay compensation.

This application is useful for notating musical ideas or quickly composing from the library of MIDI loops and grooves and built’ in synthesizers. Like Sonar 7, you can also hook up your MIDI device or keyboard and immediately control each window with the forward’ thinking ACT system, to speed up the creative process.

Dimension is probably my favorite soft-synth of all time and I’ve done considerable work with sample-based synthesizers. It has about 7GBs of default samples and a seemingly unlimited patch-set, which lets you create your own dimensions and worlds via your sampling and impulses/references. I owe a lot of my recent career work to this monster. Both Dimension and Rapture have free expansion packs on Cakewalk’s Web site as well. There is even an award-winning Garritan library included!

This works incredibly for synth’ based production, such as electronica. It allows for a wide range of sound manipulation through its knob-twisting interface.

If you want to get one of the best suites of audio and music production software for the PC, this is worth it for the performance and overall value alone. It comes with so many inspiring sounds, drums, synths, loops and effects that music will soon naturally follow.