I found its interface easier to work with than Cakewalk's, but it doesn't offer quite as many features. Less sophisticated, but powerful enough to consider, is Midisoft Studio from Midisoft Corp. You can even 'humanize' your music to make it less mechanical sounding. You can change the tempo, speeding up or slowing down the music without changing the pitch. Notes can be moved up and down on the piano-roll grid with the mouse to change their pitch. Want to hear an organ instead of a piano playing the melody? You can select from several kinds - percussive, Hammond, rock, church or reed organ - and hear the changes instantly. Staff view allows you to see, and edit, your music in conventional music notation.Ĭakewalk, and other sequencers, allow you to change sounds quickly and easily. You can see your music in different views - piano-roll view shows notes as blocks on a grid, with a representation of a piano keyboard on one side of the screen track/measure view shows each track, instrument assignments, volume and other information. Each channel can be assigned a MIDI 'patch,' or sound, from acoustic piano to gunshot. There are 16 MIDI channels - paths on which an external MIDI synthesizer or sound card can send and receive information. From Twelve Tone Systems, it's slated to arrive in stores this month.Ĭakewalk allows you to have as many as 256 tracks. There are, for example, built-in provisions for synchronizing to external tape machines, and the program allows you to 'punch in and out' to record inserts on existing tracks. Professional musicians will probably want to consider a program such as Cakewalk 2.0 Professional for Windows for its sophistication and versatility. (Those last are not for the faint of heart and require real knowledge of what you want to do.) You can edit your work, add or delete notes, change their pitch and even manipulate MIDI events such as aftertouch and pitch blend. MIDI, which stands for musical instrument digital interface, is the accepted standard for the digital representation and storage of music. Sequencers turn your computer into a recording studio, allowing you to record music from a MIDI keyboard, to play it back and to change instrument sounds. But they're fun to play with and, with a disk or two of musical clips, even nonmusicians can jazz up their presentations. Alas, if you aren't a musician, a sequencing program won't let you create a symphony on your computer. I've always wanted to play a musical instrument, and so when I learned that there were programs that let you make music with your PC, I couldn't wait to try a few.

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