MIDI Track Inspector: What's all that stuff in the patch browser?

So I'm just curious... when I have a MIDI track inserted without a synth selected I click on the Patch dropdown in the Inspector and there are a bunch of sound names. If I select one I don't get any sound from them. Considering I'd usually just pick a sound from an inserted synth I'm wondering what all that stuff in the patch browser list is? Are they place holders for some kind of standardized MIDI set up?

Sorry I can't be more clear. It's a little confusing to me. 

Cheers.

Beep that list is a list of GM patches. Because you don't have the track connected to a synth soft or hardware it defaults to a standard GM list. If it were a hardware synth and you had set up an instrument definition file for it it would list all the patches on that synth. What you can do with it is search your patches with it. By bank and by type depending on how the IN Def file is setup. 

A very handy feature for those of us using hardware. For example I have a Roland XV 5080  with some addon cards. When I want to use a patch I can find it using that browser and set the track to use that patch on the XV. Some soft synths also will show their patches to the browser. 

As for that being junk no its not. LOL  

Instrument definitions have so much potential, I always wonder why they are restricted to MIDI ports. I even took the effort to loop MIDI out and back in, just to be able to use instrument definition files for some of my VSTi. Not so much for patch lists, but it's worth it for the named CC alone. 
They could be nicely enhanced with clear names for keyswitches and other articulation related features to help working with complex VSTi (probably there is also hardware which could benefit, I am a bit behind the curve there).

With instrument definitions you can give the controllers meaningful names and even reduce the dropdown list to those that make sense for the particular instrument. Like for example in my old but loved Gofriller Cello there is this short list:

 cc1 Vibrato Depth
 cc7 Volume cc7
 cc11 Bow Pressure
 cc64 Bow Change
 cc67 Vibrato Rate


I find it nice to have just these few in the CC list and named after their function. You can of course still access them all, but (if things didn't change in the Sonar X series) there is a convenient dropdown list with just the choice you define in the file. Great feature, but reserved for hardware instruments/MIDI FX if you don't do a MIDI loopback.

Or (on the other extreme as I mentioned complex VSTi), if you ever used MindControl with Kontakt, you can do amazing stuff with that, a bunch of CC and a clever Kontakt multi. It's good to not have to go into the MindControl GUI to find out which CC are doing what. They are telling you nicely and the list to crawl through is shorter.