Why I buy this one ?
- Record, organize, and enjoy digital music; includes free NEATO CD label software
- Rip and burn music CDs to/from MP3, WMA, WAV
- Backup CDs with easy disc copying; archive data files on CD
- Transfer and restore LPs and tapes to CD
- Maximize, clean, and enhance audio with pro FX

What our customer's say!

"Okay product with some bugs", As a long time Cakewalk user, especially of their Pro Audio/SONAR family of products, Pyro has generally been a disappointment, starting from the first version of Pyro through Pyro 2004.

The problems with Pyro have been twofold: a clumsy interface and, more significantly, stability. While I have not had the setup problems that other users report -- although Pyro does require at least DirectX 9 in order to function properly -- I have had problems with Pyro generating error messages while burning CDs. Compared with more robust programs like those from Nero and Roxio, this can be an annoyance.

On the plus side, Pyro does have a nice package of features if you don't already have high end audio programs installed. Cakewalk has bundled in some of their effects audio plug-ins, and they have done a nice job of giving the user a lot of control over burning audio CDs -- including features such as volume normalization -- that are not part of your typical CD burning programs.

Cakewalk Pyro 2004 is therefore probably best for the user who has some ability to troubleshoot technical problems on their own computer, and who wants a program that gives them a lot of contol over burning of music (both audio and MP3) CDs. Please note that "MP3 activation" takes place separately from the installation of the program, and requires access to the Cakewalk website.

"Great value, easy to use, works great", I've been reading the reviews for this product, and I have to say that I'm extremely surprised at how bad some of them are. I have a lot of old audio tapes with live recordings, and I wanted a way to convert them to digital format, edit the tracks, and possibly clean up some of the sound. Most software that offers these features is pretty expensive. The next cheapest alternative I found was $80. Since I am completely new to this, I wasn't sure I wanted to spend that much money. I didn't want my ignorance to get the best of me.
I tripped over this product in a store, and purchased it without hesitation. A $30 mistake is much easier to swallow than an $80 mistake. The one thing I didn't do was read the reviews first, which I usually do. I have to say, I'm glad I didn't because they may have swayed me, and I can't complain.
This software does exactly what I want it to do. It allows me to use a line-in to record from my tape deck to my PC. It allows me to easily cut the recording into tracks. This is made easier by the visualization feature. It's a lot easier to cut tracks when you can see the fluctuations in the volume. It allows me to do some simple sound cleaning. And an added bonus, which I hadn't considered, it allows me to record directly from streaming audio. So if a band or someone is playing a live show, I can capture it and enjoy it again. I wish I had this software years ago!
For $30, you can't beat it!

"No Problem Mon", 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?

"Never got it to work", I had the same installation problems. THe program would install and I could open it, but nothing worked. I couldn't play any audio file. I just got the same error message that the file could not be opened. Emailing customer support gets very old. I tried to jump through the hoops but could never fix the problem. I'll likely give it to my sister for Christmas and hope she has better luck with it on her PC

"not user-friendly and insufficient tech support: DO NOT BUY!", I had the same experience as the person who had to go into regedit and tweak stuff to get this puppy to work. And then they won't give support over the phone -- only by email! Originally I was going to buy Roxio, but was successfully sidetracked by the cheaper price of Pyro. Ooops. I'm going to the computer store where I bought this thing to buy a copy of Roxio or Xing.
I'm giving it one star here because they won't let me give it none.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Extremely powerful, mostly easy to use", 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.

"Didn't work", 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.

"Love it", I don't understand all the hate for this product. I admit it has a learning curve. But once you get all the details down it works just grand. This years version also lets you burn on CD/RW disc which makes it even better than last years version that I thought was just as good. The sound reproduction is the best i've heard. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is the learnig curve. Otherwise im very happy with pyro 2004.

"Very Good for Making CDs from LP/Tape", 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.

"Terrible waste of time", Shuts down in Windows XP, error report appeared 5 times. Each time I started to 'add' mp3s to project it froze and pretty much never worked again.

GARBAGE!