Someone msged me the other day for information on how to write an INS file for a PC4-7 so I wrote up a bunch of tips on creating an Instrument File for Cakewalk...
Some of these might help you as well...
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You're very welcome to use my INS as a template inasmuch as I used a template from Russia for the PC3 to build mine. These things are pretty much public domain once they are out there and I believe I made a note in the header to feel free to improve on it and post it.
As far as handholding goes, the only thing I will give you is a piece of advice I've learned after making over a dozen of these. It gets EASIER as you do more and more of them. As long as you are good at dealing with hexadecimal numbers and converting them to decimal for the Bank Numbers and the Offsets and use a few tricks from the basic files that come up when you google "how to make a cakewalk INS file?"
If you have no programming background at all and are not familiar with rewriting scripts at all, then I'd advise putting this off until you finish a basic programming course. (It's the errors you DON'T SEE that give you the most grief.)
Also, one tip I can give you is to copy and paste blocks of text from the Doc files for the instrument to the appropriate numbered slots in the INS file. Also BE VERY CAREFUL WITH THE FORMATTING. Syntax errors can creep in anywhere.
ALSO IMPORTANT : Strip out ANYTHING that could be an illegal character from the patch names. Use the search and replace function of your editor to replace all the " ' ? ! , / \ & @ $ # etc out of the patch names in the final product and you will save yourself blinding hours of hunting for why patch 245 is playing patch 800 instead.
These are most of the major obstacles you face in writing an INS file and if you are cool with binary, hexadecimal and octal numbering systems then you should have no trouble following the howtos out there.
For additional help, see these two forums.
First the Legacy Forum from the original Cakewalk.
Cakewalk Forums
All articles are still relevant. INS format has not changed in almost 40 years.
Secondly, The Bandlab Forum.
discuss.cakewalk.com
And for full documentation of Cakewalk By Bandlab. (very important link)
https://bandlab.github.io/cakewalk/docs/Cakewalk Reference Guide.pdf
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BTW, while I don't know about the PC4 from beans, I will tip you off that the PC3K series has a built in command that will export the entire instrument list with numbers to a TXT file that you can import quite easily using the steps I described above.
Don't know if that's built into the PC4 but it's a good guess to say it's probably written into the Kernel of the VAST operating system.
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Gary
