What do Garageband & Cakewalk Have In Common?

We stumbled across this video on Youtube and thought it answered the question quite well! The creator of this video, Versyke, shows off his very first song created on the computer. He recorded his guitar solo using Cakewalk’s UA-1G USB Audio Interface and brought the track into Garageband for final editing.

Whether you’re using Garageband or SONAR to create music, Cakewalk’s new audio and midi interfaces can be used to record great tracks with today’s most popular music programs on Mac and/or PC.

'How to Make A Noise' Using Z3TA+

Simon Cann, author of the book, Cakewalk Synthesizers: From Presets to Power User, releases a new update to How to Make A Noise, a comprehensive guide to synthesizer programming.

The new update will be available as a free download and for purchase in print on Amazon. The new edition offers more content, more graphics and more sounds, featuring over 300 different patches.  Pick up the book to get in-depth tutorials on how to program sounds using Cakewalk’s Z3TA+; create and control your sounds with envelopes, modulation, the arpeggiator, step generator, and other playback tools. Cann also shows you how to build patches for various instruments including keys, bass, drums and more.

For more information visit SImon Cann’s website.

Using Cakewalk Instruments in OS X Hosts

Having trouble getting your Cakewalk instruments to load in your OS X DAW or sequencer? Use this guide to get Rapture, Dimension Pro and others to install correctly on your Mac computer. This guide provides basic setup information for a variety of hosts including Ableton Live, Apple Logic and Pro Tools.  There is also a section that explains what to do if your instruments are not recognized as available plugins under the OS X platform. For more detailed information on using Cakewalk’s instruments within your host, you will need to refer to the programs’ documentation.

Read through this helpful tutorial at Cakewalk.com

Kompoz.com: A Social Workspace for Songwriters & Musicians

We’ve all been there. You’ve laid out the perfect vocal track and a killer guitar solo. But you’re lacking the skills to bang out a drum track to complete your recent project. Perhaps, all you need is a little help from your friends!?

The people behind Kompoz.com are making the process of collaborating and sharing your music online with peers easier than ever. We came across Kompoz.com while searching for collaboration platforms for our users. To our surprise we found a SONAR user group with 100+ members (!) already working together on the site to create a variety of projects. Membership is free, each individual project gets its own workspace and the site supports the use of MP3, WAV and WMA digital music files. They also hold a few contests too!

Visit Kompoz.com to see how it all works and be sure to stop by the SONAR users page.

Quite Nyce Records Beats On the Road with V-Studio 100

As one of the North East’s most prolific MCs in the game today, Quite Nyce has completed three world tours with legendary hip hop acts such as Das Efx, Onyx, Lords of the Underground and Afu-Ra. He continues to be successful and 2009 is perhaps the biggest year of his career. Nyce just released a hugely popular downloadable mixtape alongside MC Seek called ‘RADIx Mixtape’, launched a critically acclaimed collaboration album with Raydar Ellis entitled, ‘The Champs vs. The League’, and began recording his album with Geoff from Portishead. Today, Quite Nyce announces the release of his digital solo album, ‘Through My Eyes LP’.

Pegged as having one of the most recognizable voices and flows of hip-hop today, Quite Nyce uses his words to embody life through music. Watch the video below to see him, spitting his soulful lyrics in action, with the SONAR V-Studio 100!

Get Exclusive Sneak Peeks at the Next Version of SONAR

As the anticipation for the next version of SONAR continues to grow, you could be one of the first to know about it’s many new features for music creation and recording by following Cakewalk on Twitter. Every day up until the launch, we will be announcing information (possibly an image) on the new SONAR. So far, we have a number of followers and invite you to join in!

If you don’t have a Twitter account, it’s very easy to set one up! If you’d rather follow along, be sure to stop by the Cakewalk Blog and see the updates as they happen. Our Tweets are sent here via RSS FEED, see them half-way down the page, on the right-hand side bar.

Don’t miss out on all the excitement from Cakewalk! Join us on Twitter today.

Create Digital Music Looks 'Under the Hood' of V-Studio 100

Create Digital Music’s Peter Kirn takes you on an extensive tour of the SONAR V-Studio 100 as a mixer, interface, control surface, digital recorder and more in his latest review. This all-in-one portable studio for Mac & PC charms Peter with its durable shell, touch-sensitive controls, and many included features. Small enough to fit most backpacks and carrying cases, this unit is a great addition to the travelling musician’s gig bag.

Peter takes an in-depth look at the VS-100. Read his entire review at Create Digital Music.com

Classic Cakewalk Tip: Complete Guide to using Rewire with SONAR

SONAR & SONAR Home Studio’s ability to work with ReWire brings exciting new possibilities to already comprehensive programs. ReWire is a software technology that allows two programs to work together in a tightly integrated way. Want to use Propellerhead Software’s Reason as a rack of virtual instruments for SONAR or Home Studio? Done. How about shooting ReBirth’s cool drum and bass line modules into SONAR or Home Studio to get rhythm section ideas down fast? Easy. Care to integrate the live performance features of Ableton’s Live! with backing tracks previously recorded in SONAR or Home Studio? Sure.

Do all this and more with Craig Anderton’s Guide to Rewire at Cakewalk.com

Live from SIGGRAPH 09: Intel Interviews Carl Jacobson & Noel Borthwick on Processor Optimizations for Music Production

At this year’s SIGGRAPH Conference in New Orleans, Carl Jacobson met with the host of Intel’s Visualize This! TV Show, Arti Gupta, to discuss Cakewalk’s advancements in it’s software performance. Some of Arti’s questions were so technical that we thought it only fair to ask Cakewalk’s CTO Noel Borthwick to add his thoughts. Watch the video and check out Noel’s comments below:

AG: Cakewalk is a member of the Intel Software Partner Program.  What challenges were you trying to solve?

NB: The bandwidth available to the typical modern DAW user using a modern CPU such as the Core I7 is astounding compared to what was available just a couple of years ago. Users expect our software to use every ounce of available CPU cycles and horsepower it can to process their audio and mix. Cakewalk has been on the bleeding edge of technology for the last 15 years, taking advantage of cutting edge capabilities of the operating system as well as available hardware resources. With multiprocessing and 64-bit computing rapidly becoming mainstream, it has become even more critical for our software to make efficient use of hardware resources.

For example, for efficient multiprocessing we try and optimize all the code paths that are used in asynchronously mixing audio. The goal is to present a multi core machine with even and distributed workloads allowing the cores to work as hard as possible. To do this, we streamline the relevant code and minimize all high latency instructions.

Some typical areas that we try and improve our performance in are:

• Multi-processor load scaling: How well does a controlled test project load across multiple CPU cores?

• 64 bit performance: How well does the 64 bit version of the application perform with multiple workloads?

• CPU use: How efficiently does SONAR play back a CPU intensive project?

• High bandwidth tests: How well does the application perform while streaming audio at high sample rates (192K, 384K, etc) and bit depths (64 bit audio, etc)?

• Low latency performance: How well does the application perform streaming audio with very small audio buffer sizes (such as 1 msec buffers)?

Continue reading “Live from SIGGRAPH 09: Intel Interviews Carl Jacobson & Noel Borthwick on Processor Optimizations for Music Production”

Live from SIGGRAPH 09: Create a Killer Score with SONAR 8

Seth Perlstein shows you how to add haunting sound effects to your audio project using Cakewalk’s SONAR 8 and SONAR V-Studio 700! This clip was the final step in the digital content creation pipeline demo at SIGGRAPH 2009. Seth show’s you how to get greater control over your entire scoring, syncing and mixing process as well as how to access more tracks and more effects with ultra-low latency by using SONAR’s latest enhancements.

In part 2 (seen below) Seth adds environmental sound effects and convolution reverberations. Watch Seth  ‘geek out’  as he explains how to build an audio studio with audio equipment small enough to fit in your backpack.