I found the bandicamp Cakewalk recently and installed it.
It will open my old CW3/4 .wrk files (never keened to pro audio) with two caveats.
1) the controls-section (left of piano roll) no longer offers the pitch shit and time-shift elements for the individual midi channels. Sadly several of my pieces utilized those features in the old Cakewalk for multi layer texturing (ex: assign three channels to a given instrumental presentation, then tweak two to slightly to expand tonality and/or provide limited midi "echo", since even with soundfonts, some music just requires a bit "more" tweaking to gain uniqueness and realism ). I even used the pitch shift in a couple cases for tone-correcting an "errant" OPL3 synth sound. (yep, I like a few of the sounds from that ancient piece of... treated right, they sound like pro gear). Again this is with v3 and v4 files, not sure about later versions.
So while a large share of my files are now playable again (old XP computer that housed my sound cards died ~2 years ago), many have lost their stacked-instrument richness, and in some cases, their entire groove
2) lyrics. Gone. Just gone. I have dozens of songs in v3 and v4 wrk files in which lyrical information was stored. Some was simply transcribed from paper for convenience (showing the band singer the meter of the words, for instance), but some of those "poems" if you will, solely exist in those files (and yes, a time-wizened me would have copied the text *out* of cakewalk...i know now...) . But unless I'm missing some nuance of the new cakewalk, I fear those bits were lost and will be until I can patch together another XP system to load my old CW 3 or 4 installation disks into, since opening a "lyrics" window shows nothing, nor are words shown in related stave views
So those are new-user my thoughts about converting old wrk files.
No diss on Bandicamp's flavor of Cakewalk intended. It seems pretty cool overall so far, although I think I have a pretty steep learning curve ahead of me.
