Howdy,

Clyde is quite right about the "channel 10" thing - that is what usually gets interpreted as "drum track", though occasionally it won't. However, if it doesn't, you can usually tell because the track will sound quite rhythmic but not melodic

(the following ended up longer than I anticipated, but it is thorough )
Fred, in the case that the instrument for "drums" showed "Piano", what probably happened is the following. As Mark has (and may do again) pointed out, midi only has certain "pseudo pitches" that it uses for each particular drum instrument. However, how a particular sound engine, which still uses midi input, interprets that can vary somewhat. In my case, I make extensive use of soundfonts, and the default soundfont that I use has something like 5 or 6 "drum kits" that it can use for a drum track.

What I find happens in my scenario, is that if I have the drum track checked as "drum instrument, 5 staff" in the track dialog box, I can change how that drum track sounds by changing the kit that I'm using. How do I change the kit from say "room acoustic kit" to "brushes kit"? I do that in my setup by changing the instrument patch name! And this does change what pseudo pitch gets interpreted as what instrument, so it doesn't adhere precisely to the midi standard. I guess it falls under the "custom drum kit instrument patch numbers" thing

So, for my setup, if I have "drum instrument, 5 staff" box checked, and I have "Acoustic grand piano" checked in the instrument patch grid, then I'll hear the acoustic room drum kit in my soundfont. Now, if I go back and change that instrument patch name to "viola" (different patch number), the drum kit that I will hear will change to "brushes kit", and I can indeed hear a different set of percussion instruments, as well as a difference in timbre for them.

Therefore, my guess is that whoever set up the file had access to a number of different "kits", and the instrument patch number got carried over for the instrument name. That happens with my files if I save them to a midi file, and I've made use of the various kits that are available within my soundfont.

I should add that if you use Biab, and you use a different sound engine for Biab than you do for Composer, it can cause some problems if you're wanting the same drum kit sound that you had in Biab. When I first started using Biab, I was using the Sound Canvas that they suggested as the better sound engine. Then I'd go to Composer to fix things up, and the drums would sound just way different. When I finally figured out the difference in the drum kits, and how I could manipulate that, it all fell into place. But boy, did it drive me nuts for a while!

I hope something in here was helpful

ttfn,
Sherry