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
