I have an old Roland rack mount synth with a couple expansion cards added to it. I am using a lot of patches from one of these cards in Sonar, and everything is working fine. However, I hate the colorful but unhelpful names Roland gave to the 256 sounds in the synth and would love to edit them to be more useful, specifically adding codes to groups of instruments (such as "pads" or "plucked") to make it easier to find what I need. Is there some file I can edit where Sonar is retrieving these instrument names? How can I find this and edit the instrument names?

Master.ins in your user directory is probably the source of the program names. Master.ins is a text file.

Thank you. It wasn't the master.ins, but another .ins file in the same directory. But now I've created a real mess of things. Just as a test I opened what appeared to be the correct .ins file in a text editor and changed the name of a single instrument. The name change didn't reflect in Sonar, so I made the horrible mistake of reloading the instrument definition, and now I'm getting a completely different listing of instrument names. The tracks that had already been assigned to patches still play correctly, but in the patch browser, all the names are wrong. What have I done!!?? I only changed a single character in a single line of the .ins file, nothing else is different. I don't understand that whole instrument definition dialog at all. I did a text search on strings in the file to see if there was some other ins file I should be using, but that turned up nothing.
 
At some point about a year ago I managed to track down on the web a file which had renamed all the patches to a different synth to more useful names and that was awesome, but doing a text search for that file turns up nothing, and I can't find it on the web anymore, so I don't know what happened to it. But it's lost now. I'm so mad I tried this. Can someone help?

If you go to Prefrences>Midi>instruments, You will see your midi ports/channel on the left and the .ins files on the right. Click a port then connect it to a file on the right side. Click the define button to edit the patch names. Hope this helps.