Cakewalk Music Creator 7 Review

Music production can be hugely rewarding but it can also be fiendishly complicated. The challenge for consumer software designers is to make something with enough assistance to get people started and enough freedom to let them follow their creative goals. Music Creator 7 comes from the makers of Sonar, an extremely sophisticated application aimed at professional musicians that makes few concessions for less experienced users. Music Creator caters for a very different audience. This is the first time we’ve reviewed this software, and first impressions were positive.

Music Creator looks clean and inviting, particularly with its single-knob effects

The interface is refreshingly uncluttered, with a Control Bar across the top offering basic file management, a toolbox, transport controls and the ability to switch between Screensets for different tasks. The area below is neatly compartmentalised with an arrange window in the middle, an Inspector for the selected track on the left and Browser on the right. The Multidock area at the bottom can show an editor for the selected audio or MIDI object, a mixer or various other panels. All panels can be hidden, undocked and relocated, but it’s good to have a sensible starting point.

After loading up a demo song, we found it easy to navigate the software, make precise edits and adjust mix settings. A new MixStrip panel includes three effects – Grit, Max and Space – which apply tube distortion, compression and reverb respectively, each with a single knob to adjust the amount of processing. There’s also a four-band EQ section with a straightforward, if rather small, graphical interface. Eleven other bundled effects include delay, chorus and gate, plus a virtual guitar amp plug-in that provides plenty of scope for sonic experimentation.

The TH2 Creator guitar amp simulator adds some crunch and wail to clean guitar recordings

Few people have lots of live instruments lying around to record with, so it’s good to see some other sound sources included. There’s a library of 2,620 audio loops that can be dropped directly onto the arrange window. They’re automatically stretched to fit the tempo of the project, but the quality of the time-stretch algorithm isn’t up to scratch. Unless a loop happened to be very close to the project tempo, the result was a garbled mess. At least the samples are labelled with their original tempos so it’s easy enough to see whether it’ll match.

There are four virtual instruments covering drums, bass, electric piano and strings, all of which include a small set of high quality sounds. The Sound Center is a more general-purpose virtual instrument with 162 sounds that serve as a useful starter pack. There are lots of additional themed Sound Packs available for £26 each from Cakewalk, and masses of third-party VST instrument plug-ins.

High quality orchestral strings are included

So too is a virtual drum kit

Incorporating virtual instruments into projects was far from simple, though. Our physical MIDI input was disabled by default so we had to rummage through the Preferences pages before we could play virtual instruments with our MIDI keyboard. Then there was the Pandora’s box of audio driver settings required to get the latency down to a sensible amount to avoid a massive delay between playing a note and hearing it. Cakewalk gives users access to advanced settings and can synchronise multiple audio interfaces, but we’d much prefer simpler options that were easier to configure successfully. Loading up virtual instruments and recording MIDI performances weren’t as simple as they could be, either. Various interface elements are derived from Sonar, but neither their flexibility nor their complexity are welcome here.

Other likenesses to Sonar are more beneficial. A Take Lanes button allows multiple takes to be recorded to the same track, and it’s delightfully easy to chop them up and splice them together to compile a perfect take, complete with crossfades to cover up the joins. This is a fantastically useful feature but it’s notably absent from other consumer software. Mix automation is extremely elegant too, with the ability to record changes to mixer settings in real time or to draw envelopes using the mouse. It’s presented neatly and doesn’t feel out of place in this beginner-oriented software.

Compiling multiple takes into a seamless performance couldn’t be easier

The mixer is unusually powerful, with options such as pre-fade auxiliary sends and support for up to eight buses that can be used either as aux effect channels or submix groups. However, people who aren’t familiar with these terms are unlikely to figure out how to use these features in a hurry. More clearly signposted effects routing would have been more appropriate. It doesn’t help that the MixStrip effects aren’t visible in the Console view, so there’s no one place to see all mix settings.

Cakewalk has put together a strong set of features in Music Creator 7 that will appeal to a wide range of musical tastes and technical abilities. However, there are too many hurdles for users to overcome before they can use the software effectively. The same criticism could be levelled at Steinberg Cubase Elements, but at least Cubase Elements is easier to get up and running with. For those who want to keep things straightforward, Steinberg Sequel 3 is our top recommendation.