Which is better?

[NotherNewbie]

I own Sound Forge 7.0 though I haven't used it much yet. I've recorded a little bit of guitar (so far so good) and also plan to do vocals. (I've got a decent voice mic and have an M-Audio FastTrack USB pre-amp which I just barely got installed on my machine and haven't even turned on yet.)

Then yesterday I got Cakewalk Music Creator Pro24 dropped in my lap.

My question: are there advantages/disadvantages to either of these two programs which ought to be taken into account to decide which would best suit my intended use?

Be merciful (and BASIC, please) because I'm a real rookie at this.

[warble]

Welcome to the board!

Sound Forge is a great program if you're dealing with a 2-track mixdown (one stereo track created from a multitrack program such as Music Creator - usually a .WAV format file). Very useful for editing, mastering, etc. and preparing many tracks to burn to CD.

If your intention is to record multiple tracks (layered, mixed), you'll need software which is capable of such. Cakewalk's Music Creator will work for that purpose. There are of course other options, but you have that program already so basically, you're set.