Oh and Eric, this has been covered many times before but as you seem a little uncertain, I suppose it will do no harm to outine a little in a bit more depth again.

Music software (without considering software that deals with digital recordings such as wav files) splits into 2 categories.

1. Sequencing software. Most of Cakewalk's products (and the only ones I have used) fall into this group. This type of software is very "performance orientated". It is designed to send a sequence of instructions to a MIDI devide. It for example can allow timings (note lengths) that simply can not be represented in musical notation. A good program like Cakewalk also allows full control of every MIDI feature and makes things like selecting an instrument, panning from left or right channel, even bending pitch, gradual tempo change, etc. easy. It could be used professionally to produce a backing track say played through a quality keyboard or dedicated MIDI device.

2. Notation software. Here, the focus changes from "perfomance" to producing written music.

There is a certain degree of cross over between the 2 types of software and it is probable (I've no experience) that some of the higher end notation programs may incorporate a lot of MIDI features but generally speaking, I think it is best to consider the 2 types as very different software. Personally, I have uses for both - though it's quite a time since I last had a real play with sequencing.

Jon