Creating Cakewalk Master.Ins Files

Cakewalk products Sonar, Pro Audio, Home Studio and others all use their Master.Ins file to store information to describe instruments including all of the patch names in each bank. This allows the sequencer to intelligently display a list of patch names instead of just numbers when configuring a track or individual patch change command.

Midi Quest XL, Midi Quest, and UniQuest are all capable of creating Master.Ins  files and the process is very easy, just load a Midi Quest Set and export the names as a Master.ins file.

Below is an example from a Yamaha Motif 6ES. It has one Performance Bank and eight Voice Banks.

After the patch names have been saved in the Master.Ins file (one file holds information for all instruments so the file is appended, not overwritten), open Sonar, and use the Assign Instruments dialog to connect the instrument to one or more MIDI ports and channels. In a Sonar track when the assigned port is selected, clicking on "Bank" will give you a list of all of the available banks on the instrument. You will see that the bank names match those of Midi Quest.

Choose the bank you want then click on the next entry in Sonar to get the following popup list of patches.

When you look at the Pre 1 Voice Bank, you can see that all of the patch names are properly listed. This took only a couple of minutes and makes the sequencer much easier and more intuitive to use.