Reference Guide

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.
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.
A. Inputs and outputs B. Joystick port
Note: The graphics in this document are from different varieties of Cakewalk software, including
older versions.
A
B