Cakewalk was a sequencer first developed by Twelve Tone Systems, Inc. (the company later known as Cakewalk, Inc.).

Originally for DOS, starting with version Cakewalk 1.0 in 1987, and, beginning in 1991, for Windows 3.0. Cakewalk, until version 4.0 required an MPU-401 MIDI interface card operating in intelligent mode, while 4.0 and later versions relied on the dumb UART mode only. Cakewalk was delivered in two versions, Cakewalk Pro and Cakewalk Express.

The latter was a lite version limited to 25 tracks and 1 MIDI output port. The Express version was sometimes bundled with hardware such as a sound card. Cakewalk was a purely MIDI based sequencer: Although it could trigger WAV files at certain points, more comprehensive audio support was not incorporated until the advent of Cakewalk Pro Audio when true support for digitized audio was added.