Jeremy Murray-Wakefield Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 I restarted Cakewalk and now suddenly the external MIDI instrument definitions have disappeared - even the built-in default ones. Does anyone know where that "database" lives and how I can recover it? - I put a lot of work into adding my own definitions... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
msmcleod Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 They're stored in %APPDATA%\Cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\master.ins 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeremy Murray-Wakefield Posted December 18, 2021 Author Share Posted December 18, 2021 Oh well... It's overwritten with an empty one now. Thanks anyway - I'll be sure to back it up periodically in future. I wonder what zapped it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeremy Murray-Wakefield Posted December 18, 2021 Author Share Posted December 18, 2021 Looking at this some more, it must have got corrupted rather than deleted. If it's completely deleted, then the auto-generated one is MASTER.INS (all caps). I've just deliberately made a corrupt one called mAsTeR.inS and after Cakewalk's auto-sanitisation it retains that capitalisation. Since the (empty) file is called Master.ins (capital "M") then it's reasonable to assume it's contents got corrupted then overwritten. Gosh that's a lot of work down the drain... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dasilvajoserubens93@gmail. Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 26 minutes ago, Jeremy Murray-Wakefield said: Olhando mais um pouco, deve ter sido corrompido em vez de excluído. Se for completamente excluído, o gerado automaticamente é MASTER.INS (em maiúsculas). Acabei de criar um corrupto deliberadamente chamado mAsTeR.inS e, após a auto-higienização do Cakewalk, ele mantém essa capitalização. Uma vez que o arquivo (vazio) é denominado Master.ins ("M" maiúsculo), é razoável supor que seu conteúdo foi corrompido e sobrescrito. Puxa, isso é muito trabalho pelo ralo ... Como fazer pra acertar? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeremy Murray-Wakefield Posted December 18, 2021 Author Share Posted December 18, 2021 (edited) 48 minutes ago, dasilvajoserubens93@gmail. said: Como fazer pra acertar? Well, if you see this has happened, you could make a safety copy of Master.ins, and then open Master.ins in a text editor and investigate whether it is possible to edit it manually to get it back to a good state. For example, if it has a line that says ".Instrume######" you could rename that back to ".Instrument Definitions" to get the information underneath back. Unfortunately, if you open the "Define Instruments and Names" dialog box, the moment you close it (even without making any changes), Cakewalk will write the instrument map that it has in memory over that existing Master.ins file. This means that if for some reason Cakewalk has lost its instrument map in memory, and you then press the "Define..." button to see what's going on, when you close the dialog, Master.ini will be zero'd even if was previously in good shape and Cakewalk just had some kind of hiccup. In my case, this all happened today immediately following a Blue Screen of Death Windows halt, so it's impossible to know exactly what went wrong. Edited December 18, 2021 by Jeremy Murray-Wakefield Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bitflipper Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 This is why I make daily backups of %appdata%. Being the general-purpose storage locker for all applications, things will frequently change in there that you're not even aware of, including plugin settings, presets, authorization keys and log files. And, of course, your Cakewalk customizations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bitflipper Posted December 18, 2021 Share Posted December 18, 2021 I should add that %appdata% is also ground-zero of much malware activity, since most other critical file system locations are protected by stricter permissions. Back when Microsoft started locking things down in Win95, they realized that there needed to be at least one place with loose security, someplace where applications can freely store their stuff. That's why %appdata% exists, and why it's vulnerable to attacks. So it's also a good idea to run something like Malwarebytes on a regular basis to root out bad stuff in there. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeremy Murray-Wakefield Posted December 20, 2021 Author Share Posted December 20, 2021 HURRAY!! Whilst looking at the properties of a random file today, I was reminded that the Windows file "Properties" dialog box has a "Previous Versions" tab! So I went to master.ins, took a look at it's Previous Versions tab and even though this particular master.ins was made from scratch only a couple of days ago, Windows listed a version of this file from a week ago, just before it got zapped. So I dragged in the version from the dialog onto the desktop, deleted the existing master.ins, and copied the previous version in its place. Sure enough - apart from some inconsequential changes from the last few days - everything is all there! VERY happy now! J. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChristopherM Posted December 20, 2021 Share Posted December 20, 2021 Sorry if this is too vague (and in any event you have sorted your problem). I have had similar issues in the past when disk space on my Windows SSD was getting low and Windows automatically and silently changed certain folders to "compressed". It turned out that Cakewalk could not read the compressed folders and assumed that the contents had vanished. Solved in my case by manually unsetting the "compressed" switch on the folders in Windows. Solved more effectively by upsizing my SSD, eventually. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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