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CAKEWALK HOME STUDIO 2002 WIN95/98/W2K/WXP |  |
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| Product Reviews from Amazon.com (Rating System 1 to 5) |
| Review | Rating | Last Updated | Very good software
I have a full review below. Just wanted to add something else. Home Studio XL in Windows 2000 gives annoying little problems that force you to stop your flow (in some cases for as long as 5 minutes when it crashes and you let windows 2000 sort everything out on its own). Every problem in the full review pertains to working in windows 2000. However, on windows 98, its smooth sailing. I never had a problem with it while working in Windows 98. | 5 | Today | difficult but outstanding
I purchased this item in spite of the warnings about how difficult it was to learn. It is indeed difficult. The tutorials are detailed, but regretfully silent on some key issues. I had to search the web for solutions to some problems I had in getting it to run on my laptop computer. The solutions simply involved toggling some options in the pull down menus, but I'd never been able to stumble onto the fixes without investing a few hours in searching the web for advice. I still can't get the chorus and reverb options to work on the mixing board. Oh well. Nevertheless, there really isn't anything else like this product -- especially for the price. | 5 | Today | Powerful tool, on a budget!
I have read the review above from the guy who says that Cakewalk Home Studio stinks, and cannot disagree more. True, you do have to learn how to master the tool before it will perform optimally, but what's the alternative? You either learn how to do it, or pay someone to do it for you. As a musical nerd/geek, I use Home Studio a LOT. I have produced my own music as well as that of others, and for the price you simply cannot beat it. Unless you are a complete weiner, you should be able to figure out how to use the software. Go on, by the software and start recording...You know you want to! | 5 | Today | For it's price it is a good value
Software sequencing is not as easy as some might think. It takes a bit of getting used to and reading up on midi, recording audio and mixing. All of this is available on the interent for free and for a person new to home studios it is an excellent supplement for ANY sequencing software. One area where Cakewalk and other "linear" sequencers create difficulty is when comparing to audio based programs like Acid. It doesn't get much easier than Acid....until you want control that enables you to add your own sounds while playing in which case you'll need the Pro version which while more capable is still not meant for using with midi in any significant way. Home Studio 2002 is an outstanding bargain. You get a couple of direct x synthesizers aka DXi. They are simple but effective enough to get the user started in software synthesis. Partiuclarly Dreamstation is useful for analog style timbres and the Virtual Sound Canvas is acceptable for traditonal sounds that will play standard midi files. The audio system is dead simple and requires about an hour to get help through the Cakewalk bulletin board or several other music related sites. Cakewalk's manuals are drab but have the information necessary to get you started. Third party books are common for software. They cut to the chase and do not have to spend the laborious time explaining the entire program. They get you going and then you continue learning with a decent knowledge of the application you are using. Feature wise you get 80% of the much more expensive Sonar program which adds a beat slicing and sequencing DXi, Rewire capability (for programs that can be synchronized in sample perfect time, some include Reason, ReBirth and Abelton LIVE) and several direct x effects. It's ability to use Acid loops and to save loops to the format makes it especially good for remixers and for those projects that needed a bit more instrumentation but survive as audio tracks. In terms of value for money this is an incredible deal. There are a couple of contenders but they are nowhere near the capability of Cakewalk Home Studio 2002 which is good enough to create professional tracks. Considering the professional quality plugins available for instruments and sound/effects processing nothing at this price point is close. Maybe the price of so much flexibility is a little extra work but that becomes a question of whether you need to work immediately or can take a day or two to master the most important aspects of the program so you can lay down tracks and midi takes. Pass on Cakewalk Home Studio if you are looking for instant gratification. Buy it if you want a taste of the pro-studio at a fraction of the cost. | 4 | Today | Great Starting point and Worthwhile Upgrade
Man Cakewalk Home Studio 2002 comes up strong! Home Studio XL heads up: If you're looking to purchase HS XL because of the DR-008SE (by FXpansion, then I suggest you don't. The DR-008SE is extremely buggy, and frequently (as in everyday) crashes and brings HS down with it. -------------- DR-008se Elaboration ----------------------------- It's a terrible nuisance! Absolutely horrific that such software was packaged and sold. I think it was just an incentive to get people to buy the pro or full version - the DR-008. Also, if you've used the DR-08SE in a project, it always says that it cant find the audio file and you have to listen to this for EVERY wave file that is used by the DR-008SE. It doesn't take long to get sick of this. FXpansion offered no solution to this when i posted it on there message board back in November. --------------------------------------------------------- Home Studio ı for the Upgrading user Awesome. I upgraded after being an expert with HS 7 (toot-toot). I think the new features I use the most are the Envelope which let you ıdrawı how certain parameters change over time, like volume (Itıs a vast improvement over recording the parameter changes into the track as in HS 7), audio exporting, like to .wma, .wav, and .rm. In HomeStudio XL, you can export a limited number of .mp3 files with this trial software. Also, augmented in this version (at least from an ex-HS 7 userıs perspective) is the fine-grain time. A note used to have 120 places within a meter where it could be placed. Now it has (wait let me checkı) 960! Funny, thing is, Iım so used to 120, that is difficult to get calibrated to 960 when reading the note start times. Ah, but HS is a sympathetic app and allows you to choose how fine you want the time to be. The gamut is from 120 ı 960. Iıve been working with 360 lately. One of my favorite new features is Groove-Clip looping. With it, you can take any piece of audio (either recorded or imported into your project/song) and delimit it using a window that makes the audio part youıre looking for pretty easy to find. You adjust the beginning and the end of what you want looped over and over again in a non destructive manner until youıre sure youıve gotten it (you can play the delimited audio from within the window to test your loop). Once youıre happy with it, you then lop off all the audio outside of what you want and whatıs left is called your Groove-Clip. With your groove-clip all set up, you can extend or contract [by dragging] it in either direction (right or left) and it is looped over and over for the distance you finalized it at. MAGNIFICANT!! I use it for guitar parts that luckily come out right. The absolutely most used feature is something called, (um hold on a secı) slip editing on MIDI clips. This allows you to silence notes without having to change there velocities to 1 or delete them. This is an INVALUABLE, and a Welcomed augmentation. For some reason, they moved Normalize Audio, and 3db louder and quieter operations off of the context menu for audio and kept it in the Edit->Audio menu section. Home Studio for the New User I have to assert that this is an excellent program for learning to compose with. It comes with tutorials that will get you up and running fast. The online help is very good too. I canıt say that there has been an instance where I couldnıt find what I wanted (not many anyway - I can say with certainty). Its user interface is so easy and it looks nice. You can mark parts of youıre song such as "Guitar Solo" or something) and navigate them quickly in 2 different ways. One takes you there immediately while the other steps you through marker by marker from where ever you start. Recording is like a 2 (setup and record) step process, which is good seeing as how youıll be rerecording a lot. Recording can be stepped up and specialized at the cost of maybe 2-4 more steps that you only do 1 time for each Different time period of the song you try to record in. Most often I use punch-in recording when specialized recording is required. This allows recording only during a time period you set. You can also set whether to record over existing notes or in addition to them. There is non-destructive editing of both audio and MIDI clips (clips are sections of notes or audio). You can import audio, export audio, and add effects to midi and audio tracks like a distortion to audio tracks that sound good. My only qualms 1-Sometimes Home Studio will playback at some awfully fast rate. Like if you recorded with the tempo at 100 bpm, then playback might be at like 600bpm. Itıs a pain in the neck when that starts happening. I think that only happens when the sound card is ıtiredı, so you should probably give it rest then. 2-To get someone on the phone at tech support takes a long time. A LONG time. However, the person I dealt with was pleasant and put an honest effort into helping solve the problem with the Dr-008se. This review is probably a bit too long, so Iıll end it now. I highly recommend Home Studio or Home Studio XL. And when you buy yours, be sure to register it, so you can get spectacular deals from Cakewalk that not even auctions can rival ı seriously! Once you use it, youıll want to use it exclusively. Iıve tried Cubasis after knowing HS and it was an unpleasant experience. The only other software I would use instead of Home Studio is Sonar. But Home Studio gives me everything I need to put songs together. | 5 | Today | Fantanstic Program!- And Inexpensive Too!
I am new to using my home PC to make digital recordings. Cakewalk Home Studio 2002 is the only recording software I have and it works great! I have a Dell Dimension 8200 computer and am running Windows XP. I agree with other reviews of this product that once you go through the provided tutorials, it's a cinch. Plus, the controls and toolbars of Home Studio make sense and are quite intuitive. The contextual help and help references are quite good. I am using an M-Audio Omni Studio with a M-Audio Delta 66 sound card and everything works great! I was pleased when the software recognized the sound card immediately after installation. I think my learning curve on Cakewalk Home Studio 2002 may have been positively influenced by my previous experience with using a 4-track, tape-based unit (Tascam Portastudio 414). Plus the toolbars remind me of the ones in AutoCAD 2000. Because the icons make sense (e.g., two small metronome buttons- one with a red square that sounds during recording and one with a black triangle that sounds during playback), the software is easier to learn. For the money, I don't think you can beat this package. I am a guitarist (classical, jazz, folk), so it may be a while before I get around to exploring all of the MIDI-type features. I think the track view is great for recording and the console view is great for mixing- very straightforward and convenient. I love that I can make MP3 files and send them as email attachments to my music loving friends. The only bummer I've encountered so far is that the MP3 encoder is only a trial one and if you want to keep it, you have to spend an additional $29. | 5 | Today | I keep finding more stuff it can do!
Great product. I bought HS2002 in November 2001 and have since upgraded to the XL version. It is very VERY deep, but also quite intuitive once you have learned the interface. I agree with one reviewer who said that if you work solo, you won't miss much in choosing HS2002 over SONAR (there are some things - SONAR has more effects, more synths, better groove quantizing -- but most of these limits can be overcome with free or low-cost DX plug-ins -- ... If you need more than two simulataneous audio inputs, you need SONAR (and more hardware too). I'm a singer/songwriter (mainly guitar, some keys), and I've done a lot of home demos and even started to use HS2002 as a writing tool, playing with loops and drum tracks. I have a MIDIman "AudioBuddy" and a dbx 286 microphone processor for getting audio in, a cheap Casio keyboard and MIDIsport 2x2 for MIDI in/out. Pretty basic, but I can get some decent sounds on a good day (my skill, patience, and creativity are the limits, not so much the tools). ... Cakewalk provides great value with this product. It is close enough to SONAR (exactly the same interface) that books such as SONAR POWER (Scott Garigus) are very useful, but if you go through some tutorials and play around, you will be making music before you know it. Very powerful, excellent integration of MIDI and audio, reasonably easy to learn and used. P.S. Right now I'm learning to program drums in MIDI and just discovered the "percussion" staff in the Staff view of HS2002. I like this better than piano rolls for programming drum parts. I discovered it also has guitar chord diagrams in the staff view. After a year, I'm still finding useful new stuff! | 5 | Today | Tremendous product
I have used this software for about 6 months now. Like any powerful software, at first it's confusing, but soon afterward, CakeWalk HS became my friend. The confusion, I believe is not so much the software per se, but rather the techno-music world. Simply, the software emulates real world editing hardware and uses real world terminology. For that reason, it uses jargon that most of us are not familiar with. Still, I would think any good music software would do the same, but this product is so inexpensive for it's power. A friend of mine has someware similar to this which cost him hundreds of dollars. He can't or doesn't do anymore than I can do. It will be years before you outgrow this software. You can't go wrong if you are serious about home music. | 5 | Today | Raises the bar for its price point
For those with a modest sound card and a modest budget, there is hardly any difference between HS2002 and Sonar, its much-praised big brother. The old HS only let you play back 8 audio tracks. 2002 offers unlimited tracks. The ability to use Acid-style techniques is revolutionary. HS2002 sounds better, even if not used in the new 24-bit mode. And the effects bundled with 2002 are much better than those that came with HS9, especially the EQ. The analog synth that comes with it is not real exciting, but the mono synth that can be downloaded free from Cakewalk's website right now is great! This is a serious product, and if you are the type of person who tends to work alone, someone who does not need more than two simultaneous inputs and outputs, you may never miss the extra features in Sonar. With the level of power this product has, I would be hard-pressed to think of ways to make it easier or more intuitive to use. My only complaint: I only recently upgraded from HS9, so maybe I'm missing something, but I cannot find a way to set it up so that double-clicking on an audio clip takes you into an edit window. Now it opens the acid loop window. It appears that the main window functions as the edit window as well. This slows you down, having to keep zooming in and out all the time to edit. In addition to music, I use HS for sound design and editing, so I really miss this feature. Other than that, a very worthwhile upgrade. UPDATE: I have not bought it yet, but the new HS 2004 is even better. You can now record more than two tracks at once (8 simultaneous tracks in '04, I think), which makes it a great upgrade if you want to record a group of musicians, or dump a ADAT session into the computer. It can run in 24/96 mode, and I think you can use more plug-ins and aux sends than in 2002. I plan to upgrade later this year and will offer my comments at that time. | 5 | Today | Older versions of Cakewalk are better
I just wanted to say that this program is very buggy and does many counterintuitive things that annoy you when you are using it. It just doesn't feel very solid overall. You can tell that the code they used has been around for awhile, with band-aids applied with each release, as opposed to just rewriting it. There are many visual artifacts that get left behind when moving notes, etc. I think there are way too many features in this program that bog it down and decrease its feel and efficiency. I had to use this version though, because Cakewalk Apprentice (which I really like) doesn't recognize my midi devices of the sblive in WinXP. It does do a few nice things, like put controllers right along with the piano roll, and gives many options when copying & pasting. | 2 | Today |
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