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Getting a Tune-up
The fun just keeps rolling along here at the House of Bat. Last week I got a version of Cakewalk for me and my son. For those of you who don't know what that is, lemme tell you about it, show you a screen shot, and talk about how cool it is.
Cakewalk is a company that makes MIDI sequencers. Basically, if you are into computer music, you'll want some fancy program to help your computer create music and control your other muscial instruments. I had the older version, but with Windows XP it stopped working and I never chased down an upgrade.
Actually, I went to the Cakewalk site several times on a lark, but durn if I could figure out what they were selling. It used to be the product was named "Cakewalk", just like the company. But when I went there, they had a bunch of strange sounding names like SONAR and stuff. None of it made any sense to me, so I didn't purchase anything.
Over the last couple of months, I've been helping one of my sons with his paino practice. I think I know a little something about this, since I took for about 12 years when I was a kid. We have been working away at it, and I thought it would be neat to have some kind of computer program so that he could be thinking about music somewhere else besides the paino.
Doing some research, I found that Cakewalk does still indeed sell MIDI sequencing and music creation software. They just changed all of their names and split their product up into a bunch of little products that they can get to to buy separately. Ah. Commerce. I wonder how many folks were like me -- couldn't understand their new product line up and never purchased the upgrade?
So after an hour on the web, I buy the simple version of the product. (I'm still peeved that I wasn't entitled to a bigger version. After all, I had spent several hundred dollars on the old one) It showed up via Fed-Ex, and Jack (my son) and I were in business. Take a look at the screenshot.
Is this a screen an engineer could love or what?
This baby has got GUI controls all over the place. It's like piloting the Space Shuttle or something. I had to watch 30 minutes of videos just to figure out how to make the thing make any sounds at all. Aside from the obvious question of "Is this really a good UI design?" you gotta enjoy something with so many gizmos to play around with.
So far, so good. I've entered in a couple of Jack's songs from his workbook into the program (you can listen by clicking). If nothing else, we're having fun. And isn't that what learning new stuff is all about?
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