“What this means to professional and amateur musicians is that Cakewalk is committed to providing platform independence. No matter what a customer’s preferred platform, Cakewalk will provide the tools they need,” said Tom Cook, president of Cakewalk Music Software.

“Cakewalk’s company philosophy has always been to provide the most powerful, usable, and affordable music software solutions to the broadest range of customers. So our movement into the Mac marketplace is a logical extension of this philosophy: now we can offer solutions to customers across platforms.”

theo

It was able to interface with Deck II (which wasn’t developed by Macromedia, but was bought from OSC and rereleased) and synchronize Metro’s MIDI with Deck II’s audio. When Metro 3 (or whatever version it was) came out with integrated audio, I was terribly disappointed. Metro’s built-in audio was a big step down from the combined Metro/Deck system. It was slow, took forever to render the waveforms (even on my relatively fast PowerMac 8600/300, upgraded with a 500MHz G3, 512MB RAM, and a good FWSCSI card and 10,000RPM drive for audio), and crashed a lot.

I ended up sticking with Metro 2.5 and Deck II.

Deck II was a great piece of software, too– inexpensive and (I thought) better than ProTools. It ran well on smallish Macs and produced results that sounded as good as anything out there. It was easy to use and very zippy.

Here’s some more info on that:

http://sitenoise.com/deck/index.html

Ah ha, and here’s where Cakewalk bought Metro from JS Technologies:

http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/SNAMM97/Cakewalk/metro.html

Post-buyout, neither piece of software held up well under major corporate featuritis…

I liked Metro quite a bit over 1998-2000, although it didn’t get on well with my midisport. I recall fondly it’s rhythm explorer feature and its quantize templates, which were pretty damn useful. The offline effects were a drag, but I didn’t know any better about that until I got involved with Cubase, itself a temporary stop on my way to Logic. Nice to know the program’s still around. Wonder who uses it?

msd

Now if I can just be wrong / misleading more often, er . . . hmmm.

In all seriousness, I do remember Metro. And I think Z3TA+ is the strongest bet. Even if that doesn’t change my opinion that they should make Project5 cross-platform. (notice, however, that Cakewalk has not appointed me to a leadership position, probably with good reason)