Customer Reviews

Cakewalk Pyro 2004

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

The Cakewalk Pyro 2004 offers the usual CD copying, mp3, WMA and wav ripping, data cd creation, playback, file organizing, ID3 tags, CDDB lookup. However it offers a boatload of useful features not found elsewhere. You can record line-in from the microphone, as well as hook up your stereo. Then clean up hiss, cracks and pops, as well as add Reverb, Delay, Chorus, & other effects with Plasma FXPad. You can work with a waveform, tweak the sound effects, graphically edit crossfades, volume, start & end times, and playback segments until you get it just right before burning to an audio CD. Additionally, you can encode entire mix playlist to one continuous MP3/WAV/WMA, or split audio files graphically into multiple tracks.

You can also selectively rip tracks from a CD by preselecting them before ripping. You can easily arrange playlists and then burn them into audio or mp3, wma CDs.

The best feature for me is the ability to record anything playing through your sound card including streaming audio. This is not fully explained in the documentation, but the instructions at their website explain how to set this up. You can either record live, or you can set a schedule timed to start at a particular time, for a particular duration, or end-time. This beats running the output from one computer's line-out into your line-in. You can convert this WAV file to MP3 or WMA, with a choice of quality for MP3 files.

The strongest feature set is the extensive audio editing, enhancement, cleanup, crossfades, and volume leveling controls. This is not found in the other comparable programs. The jukebox feature does not compare to other programs, and is basically consists of playback of playlists. The user interface is not too intuitive, so expect to spend some time with the documentation or to go to the website and newsgroup. For example, to convert audio format, you need to select the files, and then hit a "More" button at the top of the pane. There is no "right-mouse-click" as you might expect. However all in all, I'm highly satisfied with this program for the audio capabilities not found elsewhere.

I almost didn't buy this program based on the negative comments I read here. I run XP and wanted to take my old, out of print vinyls and make CDs from them. I found it to be very good for that. I just record an entire side of an album to a file, split it up into tracks visually by looking/listening to the waveform, and optionally cleaning up, enhancing the sound. I can truncate tracks if I let the record go too long. I found the process to be very easy, and it produced a good quality CD. I also used it to rip MP3s from CD so I could combine a number of audio CDs onto a single data CD (I just got the Cambridge Soundworks table-top radio CD player, that support MP3s; love it). There were a few small user interface things that I thought could have been better. Like automatically putting my ripped MP3s into a folder hierarchy based on artist and album title. But all in all, I'm very pleased so far.

I am running XP; I bought Pyro 2004 to replace Roxio because I liked the idea of an integrated package. However, there were problems from the start.
In "Record an Audio File" mode, Pyro unpredictably shut down when I hit stop play on an mp3, or when I tried to display an mp3 in the lower panel. In some cases it generated an error message.
I contacted product support; this is what they told me to do:

1. You'll need to uninstall Pyro 2004 or MediaWorks. Remove all
shortcuts also.

2. Click the Windows Start button and select Run. At the prompt type
REGEDIT and click OK.

3. Backup your Registry before making edits - you do this by clicking
the Registry menu, Export Registry File.

4. Now delete the following Registry keys
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cakewalk Music
Software\"MediaWorks"
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Cakewalk Music
Software\"MediaWorks"

If you have "Pyro 2004" instead of "MediaWorks" delete that folder
instead.

5. To ensure that other programs are not interfering with the
operation of MW or Pyro, do the following.

* turn off auto-insert notification for all of your CD drives (click
Start, Settings, Control Panel, System, Device Manager)In XP, put a CD
in and select "Take No Action" and put a check where it says "Always
Take this Action."
In Win 98/ME/XP, choose Start | Run and type MSCONFIG. Click OK, then
click on the Startup tab at the upper right of the window that opens.
Uncheck all items listed, click OK, then restart your computer. You
can always recheck those items again at a later time. In Win 2000,
click Ctrl+Alt+Del and manually End Task on the items you don't need
running. Restart

6. If you have Adaptec Direct CD, Napster or Roxio's GoBack, make sure
you uninstall or disable them temporarily. Also temporarily uninstall
any other burning software on your machine. Now reinstall Cakewalk.

Other mp3 burners do not need this much nursing; Roxio and Xing work perfectly out of the box.
I'll probably have to go through this procedure, since I won't get my money back. If I'd known then what I know now...

I bought this program three days ago, 7/12/2004. I just bought a brand new computer with XP, and a CDRW Drive, and a DVDRW drive came standard with the computer. PYRO 2004 keeps telling me my computer has no rewritable drives installed, so I go to the cakewalk website to download the new drivers list so it will recognize at least one of my drives, and still no sucess. The only way to get support for this product is through E-Mail. Three days and I'm still waiting. I will never buy a cakewalk product again. They use to be good with music programs.

Pyro does an incredible number of things really well. It took me a little while to figure out a few of the interface features, but after I sorted it out, it was really easy to use, as well. You can rip CDs to MP3, burn CDs, play music, record and edit audio files, and even interface with a portable MP3 player. I ran this under XP and I personally didn't have any trouble with bugs in this software, so I can't corroborate the problems some previous reviewers had at all. Perhaps the version I got had bug fixes already applied.

The interface is organized into tabs, and the start page gets you started with links to common tasks. It launches you into the appropriate tab of the interface with a little help bar that tells you what to do next. That part works pretty well. The issue I had with the interface is that switching amongst different tasks within the sam etab involves using some little icons. It took me a while to notice these icons, and there wasn't a manual to point this out. This meant that the first several times I used Pyro, I kept having to go back to the start screen to do anything different, and it meant that I didn't know about some of the views built into the system. For example, I initially thought that Pyro had the most broken interface ever for listening to an MP3 playlist, because the only view I could find was the waveform view, which organizes tracks left-to-right as waveforms that you can apply effects to. Needless to say, that's not exactly the most intuitive way to listen to a playlist of songs. After I decciphered the interface, it turned out that there was also a straightforward list view, and it was really easy to switch between the two.

As a CD burner, Pyro is very effective. It's easy to build simple playlists (once I found the list view!), but you can also build more elaborate DJ mixes in the waveform view. Even if you don't want to do all that, you can still use useful features like adjusting the audio levels to make sure all your tracks have roughly the same loudness. Personally, I make DJ mixes using Traktor by Native Instruments, which is a powerful tool for live DJing. The problem is that by making one long file of the whole mix, there aren't any track breaks. So the track split feature of Pyro is one of the most useful to me. I can insert track break points, and either burn the resulting mix as a series of tracks, or even save the individual tracks as files (WAV, MP3, or WMA) if I want. Pyro can also make straightforward Data CDs, by building a list of files and folders you want to burn.

As a CD ripper, Pyro uses an adjustable, high-quality MP3 filter, so you can get extremely high quality results (or smaller files, if you prefer). It also can rip to WAV or WMA, though I haven't tried this. It was easy to use, and grabbed CD info from CDDB, as you would expect. My only complaint in ripping CDs was that it didn't let me set the filenames like I wanted to. By default it used the track name as the name of the file, and there was an option to prepend the track number. But there wasn't an option to include the artist name or album name in the filename, which is a little annoying.

I haven't tried to use Pyro with a portable MP3 player. The program includes a link to a webpage that shows which players are compatible with it. If you're interested, here's the page: http://www.cakewalk.com/Owners/Pyro2004/Portables/ . The basic transfer interface appears to be straightforward.

Pyro doesn't burn DVDs, so if you need this feature, this isn't your program. However, Cakewalk does make a program called MediaWorks, which appears to work just like Pyro, but with additional features for burning DVDs. I haven't used MediaWorks, so I can't comment on it.

Pyro works perfectly well as a playlist-based audio file player, though there's nothing really special about it. As far as I can tell, it doesn't maintain its own music file database like some of the jukebox programs, so you just use the file browser pane to drag files from their directory into the playlist. Personally, I would recommend Winamp for music playback (and it's free), but there's nothing wrong with Pyro if you want to use it for that. On the other hand, it's a fairly handy recording program. It gives you basic level meters so you can set your recording level (in the Windows volume control), and it drops the recorded project right into the audio editor pane when it's done, so you can split tracks, readjust levels, add effects, etc. One nice thing is that it uses standard DirectX effects, so if you have other audio programs that come with DirectX effects (such as other Cakewalk programs), you can use all of those effects in Pyro, as well.

It took me a little bit of work to get up to speed with Pyro, but now that I have figured it out, I really like it, and I recommend it for most tasks. I've used previous versions of CD Creator Deluxe (though not the current version), and I think Pyro is a much more polished (and more reliable) program. It does everything I need it to, but it's very streamlined for all the things it does.

This software is costly if you plan to just rip tracks for MP3 in or out.
Cakewalk Pyro. First you will find that the Gearlang DLL file hasn't been up dated to run with XP multiuser windows software, which XP has been out on the market for years. The dll file library is not a shared library which means only one user can rip CD'S that user is the admin. of that computer; so everyone else will have access to the admin's personal files while using this program. Be aware of the limits of this software. If you really need the bells and whisles it might be a value to you? NOTE Gerland DLL. file 95/98/NT (NO) 2000 or XP update.

I dunno what people's problem is, maybe they are using Windows 98 or something. But for Data back-up and music compilation, it couldn't be simpler or more reliable (so far -it's been a few months). So, what's the Problem?

I bought this program after reading reviews of several products. Maybe it's the best thing since sliced bread, but I couldn't get it installed. I called and e-mailed Cakewalk's tech support, and after 5 tries I gave up. I have a new machine running Windows XP, and even though the program is supposed to be compatible, it isn't. I've since heard from several would-be users who have had similar problems. I don't know what to recommend instead of this program, but unless you're willing to pay a high price in frustration, get something else.

I bought this as an upgrade from Pyro 2003 which worked very well. I found the 2004 version to be less user friendly so far and not any faster than Pyro 2003. At least it works better than the Roxio CD Creater 5 did! I mostly burn CDs from MP3 and LPs and it works fairly well for that.

Installed, following directions precisely. Tried to rip one track from a CD. Didn't work. Tried 5 times. Went online to obtain driver updates. Tried same CD. Didn't work. Tried a second CD -- 5 more times. Same error message.

Was there any quality assurance done on this project by Cakewalk? I am seriously disappointed. I want my software to work right out of the box. This piece of junk didn't even come with a manual. You open the box and it contains a CD and a piece of paper telling you to visit Cakewalk's website. Lame, lame, lame. I don't have time to track down solutions to problems that should have been caught by Cakewalk's QA dept. Shame on you, Cakewalk.