Cakewalk Pyro 5 review

Pyro was one of the first programs to enable users to convert music between audio CD, WAV, MP3 and WMA formats.

Its streamlined interface made it popular with musicians who wanted a simple music management tool. Since then, free software tools such as iTunes and Windows Media Player have become increasingly sophisticated, but none that we know of can convert freely between all the above formats.

Five versions in, it's good to see that Pyro is still streamlined and uncluttered. A welcome page presents a list of available tasks, and buttons along the top provide direct access to six main areas. The core duties of audio CD burning and ripping are supplemented by data CD and DVD burning, transferring to portable players (where you'll find format conversion tucked away), disc duplication and a new ringtone creation feature.

Pyro 5 supports only MP3 - and not MIDI - ringtones, but they're easy to create from a CD track or music file. Best of all, you can upload your finished files to a server and download them to your phone. This feature is only essential for the few phones that support web access and MP3 ringtones but not USB transfers. Still, it's neatly implemented and makes it easy to share ringtones with friends.

The rest of the software is decent, but unremarkable. You can overlap tracks on an audio CD, but the waveform display is misleading and you have no control over the track ID point. CD ripping includes extensive options for naming tracks, but WMA encoding is fixed at 128Kbit/s.

For advanced audio CD creation and file conversion, Magix Audio Cleaning Lab Deluxe, which we reviewed in What's New, Shopper February 2005, is a better bet. But Pyro's ringtone creator certainly helps keep it in the running.

Author: Ben Pitt