Instruction Manual

Beginner’s Guide to Cakewalk Software
If you have little or no experience using music software to play and record music, this
guide is for you. This guide explains the terms and concepts you need to know to use
music software. You can get much more help in every Cakewalk program by using the
Help menu, or by pressing F1 when you have any view or dialog box open. All Cakewalk
programs have very basic tutorials in the Online Help that cover recording and playback.
To view these tutorials, open the Help menu, click Help Topics, and look for topics called
Getting Started or Tutorials.
Note: the graphics in this document are from different varieties of Cakewalk software,
including older versions.
The basic way that you use a computer to record and play sound is this: your computer
has a circuit board in it called a sound card, which converts the sound from an electric
instrument or microphone into a long string of numbers, which a computer stores and then
converts back into sound when you want to play the recording. Almost every computer
comes with a sound card which is good enough to make very good, but not fully
professional-level recordings.
The sound card has inputs and outputs on it, which you can see by looking at the back of
your computer.
Inputs and
outputs
Joystick port