 This is a MacBook Pro and this is Cakewalk by BandLab, the best free music production software made for Windows. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Cakewalk by BandLab is a fully featured digital audio workstation or door and you can use it for music production and incredibly it's free but it's only made for the Windows operating system. Unfortunately for those people who are using the Mac operating system there isn't such a great choice. So I'm often asked if we can get Cakewalk to run on Mac hardware and the answer is yes. And I'm going to show you how to do that in this video. There's no hacks, there's no virtual machines and we're actually going to be using something which is built into the Mac operating system itself. But before we get into that let's talk about the what's and the why's. So the MacBook Pro which I've installed Cakewalk on is this one, the 2015 model with a 15 inch retina display. It's got a 2.8 gigahertz i7 processor, it's got 16 gigabytes of RAM and a whopping one terabyte flash drive, very similar to an SSD drive. So a non-physical drive so it runs nice and quiet and really, really quick. So it's great specs actually to run Cakewalk on and you can pick these up on eBay for around about five to $600. That's really good value and as I say it's got plenty of grunt to actually run Cakewalk. So if you've got one of these sitting around there's definitely no need to go out and buy a new PC laptop or desktop to run Cakewalk. And if you're looking to buy a second hand laptop specifically to run something like Cakewalk then this is a really good option. So I've been really careful not to say that we can run Cakewalk on the Mac operating system. That's still not possible. But what we can do really quickly, really easily and really efficiently is run Windows alongside the Mac operating system on our Mac. And we can use that to host Cakewalk. Now we're actually going to use something which is built into the Mac operating system itself to do that. It's been there for many, many years and it forms the basis of our plan here and it's something called Bootcamp. Let's find out how I went about installing Cakewalk on this MacBook Pro. So I actually started the process in the Mac operating system. So I started up my Mac as normal and once it was open I went to the Safari browser which is there for everybody. Once I opened that I then went to this address which you can see at the top here. I'll put a link for this in the description down below and then I downloaded Windows 10 as an ISO file. I selected that right at the bottom here. That's the only selection for me and I just scrolled down a bit and then clicked on the confirm button. After the screen had refreshed I then went ahead and selected my language which is English. Hit confirm again here to refresh the screen and then I went ahead and I clicked on the 64 bit download. Now here in Safari we can monitor the download progress at the top right hand corner here but I'll spare you the pain of that and we'll fast forward the video to the point where I had it downloaded. Now once it had downloaded I actually went ahead and I quit Safari as I wasn't gonna need that anymore. So I pressed shift command U on my keyboard to open up the utilities folder on my Mac. I then double clicked on boot camp assistant and then went down and pressed continue. I then went and selected the only selection I could make which was the ISO file I downloaded earlier and then I went ahead and decided on a partition size. Now if you're mainly using this for Windows you may want a small Mac OS partition size like this one or if you're mainly using it for Mac then you may make your Windows partition small. I'd make it at least 200 gigabytes but I actually went ahead and made mine 300 gigabytes which is probably enough for my needs to have cakewalk on this computer with a few plugins, et cetera. I then clicked on install and it went ahead and downloaded some support files that it needs for installation after Windows is installed. This is basically gonna be used to set up the hardware and the drivers needed for things like your webcam and your network, et cetera on your Mac. Now that takes a little while and sometimes you may think it's frozen but it does take a while but I am gonna save you the pain and fast forward to the point where that's done. Now after that's done it's actually gonna automatically restart your Mac, the screen or flicker, et cetera and then when it does restart it's going to go into the regular Windows installation process. Now if you've installed Windows before most of this is gonna seem quite familiar but there are some slight differences which I'm going to point out. So hang in there with me here because you'll want to know about these. So as you can see I went ahead and I selected my language and time settings here. So I'm in Australia, so my time is English, Australian format. I then clicked on next. Now I have a product key for this installation of Windows. If you don't have a product key you can still go ahead and install Windows and it's gonna work. I think there's a watermark once you've installed it and there are some restrictions on updates perhaps but you will be able to test this out and run Cakewalk, et cetera. Now if you don't have a product key the next couple of screens are also gonna be slightly different for you because by entering the product key the system knows which version of Windows I have but if you don't enter one then it doesn't know. So on the next couple of screens you will actually have to select a version to install. So there's things like Windows Home and there's things like Windows Pro, et cetera. Now I prefer the Pro version but I do believe that Cakewalk is gonna run fine in the home version as well. So anyway, after I went ahead and entered my product key I then went ahead and clicked on the next button. I'll just wait till I've entered that product key. There we go. So I clicked on the next button and then it took me to this next screen here where we're already of course knew which operating system I was using which is Windows 10 Pro so I just clicked on next there to go ahead and install that. I then of course read the license terms and told them that I accepted them and clicked next again. Now it's most important that you do select this boot camp partition to install Windows then click next and you'll find that the installation process at this point is actually quite quick. Now I think on my particular Mac that is because I'm using this one terabyte flash drive which is very similar to an SSD as I said but it's going from that drive to the same drive which I guess is why it's quite a quick installation process. In any case I am going to fast forward to the point where that has been done. So it then went ahead and it restarted my computer again to continue with the setup procedure. Now I selected my country Australia and then we're ahead and clicked yes for that. And then after a moment or two I selected my keyboard layout which is US so clicked on yes for that and I didn't wanna add any second keyboard so I skipped that. Now the next thing I did was I clicked on I don't have internet and that's because the Wi-Fi won't work until a little bit later. I clicked on continue with limited setup and the reason the Wi-Fi isn't working at this point is because the drivers need to be installed a little bit later. We'll do that once we've actually got Windows installed so I wouldn't bother trying to actually use the Wi-Fi and connect to the internet at this point. Now it sort of restarted again and unfortunately I had to go through this sort of loop with this and click on I don't have internet again and then click on continue with limited setup. I don't know why it goes through that loop but it happened every time I went through this process. I then went ahead and inserted my name here and then clicked on next and then I created a password so that I could log into Windows and then once I'd done that again I clicked on next and then I had to confirm that password the usual routine here. Again, I clicked on next and then there was some security questions that I had to answer. This is so I can sort of recover my Windows installation a little bit later on if I want to. So I'll go ahead and fast forward the video through this part. You can of course set up your own security questions. Now there's a whole bunch of privacy settings that they asked you about here. I generally switch everything off here and that's because most of these things in my experience tend to slow down your computer. So yeah, I switched them all off. Maybe you could leave location on but mostly I like to switch it off. I then went ahead and accepted all of my choices there and then I didn't want to use Cortana so I just clicked on not now for that and then it went ahead and it started to finally sort of set up everything that I needed in Windows. So I'm gonna fast forward through this part of the process as well. And once Windows starts up you're gonna see that it's got this rather odd resolution where everything looks huge. Just leave that for the moment because it'll figure out the screen resolution for itself a little bit later on. The one thing that you'll notice it's different to a regular Windows installation is this window has opened up, the boot camp window. This is where it's gonna go ahead and install everything it needs to make all the hardware on this machine work properly. So I went ahead and I clicked on next on that window and then I just accepted the terms and the license agreement, clicked on install. And again, it goes ahead and it installs everything that it's going to need to make all the hardware and everything work on this Mac. So we'll fast forward again through this process. Now during that process it actually did figure out something out about my screen resolutions. Unfortunately, it's kind of set it to the highest resolution which I think is a bit of overkill. This is almost a 4K resolution. I'll adjust that a little bit later on. But in any case, the boot camp installer has finished at this point. So I went ahead and I clicked finish and then it asked me to restart the computer. I clicked yes there to confirm that and it went ahead and restarted Windows. So Windows restart again and that's really all of its installation done but I did wanna make sure I went ahead and set up the Wi-Fi so I can go ahead and download Cakewalk. So I went to the bottom right hand corner for that and then just clicked on that network icon there and then went ahead and selected my Wi-Fi network and inserted the passwords, et cetera. That's gonna be a little bit different depending on what you've got available but I will definitely go ahead and set up your Wi-Fi so you can connect to the internet now. Now with all of that done I wanted to go ahead and actually install Cakewalk. So I'm gonna invite you to go down to whatever web browser you're using. In this case, I clicked on the Microsoft Edge web browser and then go to cakewalksetup.com. This is my own completely free workshop which you can use as a guide to installing Cakewalk. I walk you through how to download it and where to download it and the initial process of setting up the hardware on your computer. Now none of this is particularly exciting but it is very, very necessary. So hopefully if you use this workshop you'll get through it as quickly as possible and then you can start actually making some music. Now you may be finding at the moment that every time you start up your Mac it automatically goes into the Windows operating system but you may wanna get back to your Mac operating system. Well, it's really easy. Just make sure when you're starting up that you hold down the option key while you press the power button and then after a moment or two you'll get this menu which pops up where you can choose between your Mac and your Windows operating system. It's that easy. So how well does it run? Well, the answer is really well. Despite its age, this machine is actually quite powerful and will run some pretty large projects in Cakewalk. The only thing you really have to do is learn how to use it. Now one of the places you may go for help is my Facebook group for Cakewalk by BandLab. Follow the links in the description for that. It's full of really helpful people who are gonna help you out with some of those teething problems. Now the other thing you may wanna do is watch this playlist that I have here on YouTube. This is full of tips and tricks for Cakewalk and runs you through all of the basics. Why don't you grab yourself a beverage, sit back and binge on that right now.