If you plan to publish your songs

If you plan to publish your own songs, we encourage you to follow the General MIDI authoring guidelines. These guidelines are quite detailed about the exact layout of many types of song data, and a complete discussion of them can be found on the World Wide Web at www.midi.org. However, SONAR can help you to conform with the GM guidelines if you follow these practices:

Always save your master copy of any work in progress in SONAR project (.cwp) file format. When you are ready to publish your work, use the File > Save As command to create a Standard MIDI Format 0 file.

All of the major publishing guidelines recommend that you use Standard MIDI File Format 0 instead of Format 1. Some sequencers cannot read the more complex Format 1 files, particularly sequencers embedded in some types of hardware such as karaoke players.

Load the “Turn GM System On” system exclusive bank (gmsystem.syx in your Cakewalk directory) in the Sysx view, and set the bank to Auto Send. This message will not only re-initialize a General MIDI compatible sound module to a known state, but will also tell SONAR to generate GM setup measures for your program changes when you save the project in Standard MIDI Format. See Variables in the [Options] section for information on disabling setup measure.

For best results, you should always place program changes and other MIDI messages in the same tracks as the notes they affect. This keeps the data for each track together as a single unit, and avoids problems that might occur when SONAR cannot easily correlate the program changes with the note events.