Greetings Everyone -

Here is all I want to do:

Take my Midi Accordion and play it along with a Ketron XD3 arranger. I want to record everything and then burn the songs onto a CD.

Believe it or not I am very computer literate, and have quite a powerful machine for home use. I have a second 40 Gig drive sitting idle in it for my recordings.

Can I just take some inexpensive application like Cakewalk Home Studio and record and burn this music? I have a MIDI sound card in my PC and was thinking that I'll just connect it to my Accordion, which is connected to the arranger, and then I'll just record it all with Cakewalk.

Is there a better way?

Thanks.

Are you planning to record the sounds from just the XD3 or the accordion as well? I don't know how modern accordions work: in other words, is there some sort of audio output or is it just an acoustic instrument, like the old Soprani or Scandalli I used to know? The question is relevant, because if the accordion has some sort of audio out then you need to connect the audio outs of both the accordion and the XD3 to the audio in of a mixer and the audio out of the mixer to the line/audio in of your sound card, in order to record the sound from both instruments. If, on the other hand, the accordion is like the old plain accordions, only with a midi out added, then you'll of course need a microphone to record its sound and the mic should then be connected to the mixer.
Sorry for asking such naive questions, but when it comes to accordions I am kind of lost, I guess.

By "record" do you mean audio or midi or both? If you capture midi then you can "fix" any problems then play the midi back to your accordian and module whilst recording the resultant audio. You may need to to adjust the midi output settings of the accordian so as to capture all activity.

I think any recent Cakewalk is sufficiently powerful for you audio/midi recording needs although if you really want to mess about with audio files you may need something specific like SoundForge.

You'll find a complete set of instructions at http://psrtutorial.com/Lessons/L_Recording/LPR-MakeCD/lpr-makecd.htm which will cover all the basics using SoundForge or Goldwave. Goldwave can be downloaded from www.goldwave.com and both are excellent recording programs.

Good Luck,
Gary