What is the Master? Where is it?

[shmoog]

I am brand new to Cakewalk and I keep getting a notifications that a "Master Bus" is not connected to an output and I can't hear a thing inside Cakewalk.  What is a Master Bus and Where do I find it?

[bitflipper]

Broadly speaking, a bus is where signals are combined together. A project can have any number of busses (e.g. mixing all the drums together via a "drum bus"). A "master bus" is where all tracks and busses come together to make the final output for your mix.

Busses are created and manipulated in the bus pane, a separate portion at the bottom of the Track View window. It's there that you'll find the master bus. 

For sound to happen, you need to a) direct tracks to one or more busses and b) direct the output of the final (master) bus to your sound card. Here's a picture. If you don't see the bus pane, click the circled button at the bottom. Note that in my picture, "Speakers (Saffire Pro Audio) 1/2" has been selected as the bus output. That's just what my audio interface identifies itself to Windows as. Your choices will probably be different.

Note that technically you don't actually need any busses at all. You can simply route each track to the computer's audio hardware. But that's not recommended for a number of reasons. Usually, you have at least one bus and its output is routed to the audio interface. Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be named "Master". You can name it anything you like.

 

[sjoens]

You have to set up your sound source in Preferences. Then you will see Hardware Outputs (E) to the far right in Console View.

[Bristol_Jonesey]

If you start a new project using one of the built in templates, you'll find a good number of them already have a master bus created for you and, at least on my laptop, it's routed to the correct output

[John Vere]

You should watch some tutorials. Mine are numbered in order of what you need to learn first. 

 

[InstrEd]

+1,000 to John Vere's Tutorials

[57Gregy]

This is from the Basic template. If you click the arrow at the bottom outlined in red, all your existing busses will show. You can see the Master is there and is output to Speakers.
On the left you can see the same bus marked Master, which is also how it would appear in the Console view. You can expand the console view from the bottom.

Since you already have a Master for whatever template you're asking about, you just need to find it and set its output to whatever valid output your sound card or audio interface has. 

[Alan Tubbs]

Many times the Master buss is rolled over in the console view.  You have to pull the tracks and output section to the left to expose the master buss.

[TVR PRODUCTIONS]

I get this message when opening a couple of projects.  Yet, I see that my master is outputting to my audio interface left and right channel.  And everything sounds fine.  Not sure why I see this.