Yeah I''m also interested, I have a Yamaha PSR-330, with midi out, and I have no idea where to start. But I do have a midi cable at least.

Where do you get cakewalk? How much does it cost? Why the hell does it cost so much? Etc etc.



The_Minister

I believe I got my copy of Cakewalk at Best Buy. I think I paid around 80 for the home studio. Not too bad. There are other programs out there but Cakewalk is the best out of the three I tried (the others were buggy and really sucked. Cakewalk has a few bugs (sometimes your instruments get a little weird) but it''s a very nice interface).

I really shy away from feeding audio into my MIDI files. It kind of misses the point of using MIDI anyway if you record an entire track, because the point is to save disk and RAM space. If you don''t care about that you should probably be using MP3''s. I really like DMusic because it synthesizes the Roland patches regardless of sound card, so I just pull up the MRMIDI player I wrote and check how it sounds when I have something presentable in Cakewalk. Unlike a lot of other synths, DMusic isn''t that hard on your processor.

I have an ancient PSR510 plugged into my machine but I basically never use it for composing anymore, I prefer just clicking onto the page in Cakewalk... then again I visualize standard bar format whereas other people (like one of my sisters) visualize the keyboard. Just a matter of preference. One of my friends is so instrument-oriented that he had me design him a set of circuits that could handle drum input (that was interesting.)

-fel