Cakewalk (company) - Definition and Overview

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.

Home Studio 2002 - a Cakewalk product

SONAR creates projects which 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.

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 MS-DOS and since 1991 for Windows 3.0. Interestingly, 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 todays clones, while later versions (since 4.0) relied on dumb UART mode only. Cakewalk got renamed into Cakewalk Pro at some point, and later into Cakewalk Pro Audio when support for digitized audio was added.