Cakewalk lets you record as many MIDI and digital audio tracks as your hardware will allow (up to 256), and they will play back in perfect sync. You can perform a wide variety of editing on both MIDI and audio. A CPA-equipped PC can be used as a multitrack, a mixdown deck, or both, and you can output to external sound gear, or to a .WAV file.

This is a very full-featured program. Over the years, Cakewalk has accumulated an amazing number of editing tools for both MIDI and digital audio. Naturally you can cut, copy and paste in a variety of ways. There is also a very robust multi-level Undo feature. MIDI edit commands include Quantize, Groove Quantize, Transpose, Invert, Retrograde, Prepare Breakfast (almost)… In fact, each of these commands opens a dialog box with several parameters that can be set, allowing very complex editing. In the unlikely event that you can't do what you want with one of the editing commands, there is CAL, the Cakewalk Application Language. If you're ween enough, you can use this language to write your own scripts and perform any sort of edit you can imagine. Audio editing options include a noise gate, a graphic EQ, a parametric EQ, a volume envelope, Normalize (maximizes level without clipping), and of course, Reverse for those psychedelic backwards sounds.

With so many accumulated features, there's always a danger of the screen becoming too cluttered, but Cakewalk has done a good job with the user interface, which is reasonably intuitive, flexible and customizable. While some of the more complex editing operations require some manual-reading, the most frequently-used tasks are simple enough, and can usually be performed in more than one way. Unlike some other programs I could name, Cakewalk avoids superfluous dialog boxes and mouse-only operations. To play a selection, simply hit the spacebar. Hit it again to stop, then a third time to play again. Recording is as simple as selecting a track and pressing record.