Rating: 
Summary: Didn't work
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Extremely powerful, mostly easy to use
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Terrible waste of time
Review: 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!
Rating: 
Summary: Extra Features not found in other CD audio software
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: XP upgrade?
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: This product is severely lacking
Review: When I buy CD burning software, I don't expect much. If you want to edit something, you are going to buy editing software, so halfway attempts to add editing functionality are superfluous. The one thing I do expect is that it be able to burn a CD-Rom. This product has no ability to burn a CD-Rom unless YOU CREATE THE CD-ROM INSIDE PYRO!!! This means if you have an old ghost image, forget it. Download a linux iso, forget it. Do you have backups, lying around on your hard drive? Forget it.
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