Project not stopping at end

did you try a save as with a new name?

But this project has always been kind of quirky. It's quite light, only 8 tracks, including 2 MIDI (4 counting the instruments) a few folders, and only about 70 measures, but it is VERY sluggish when I save it. After doing a Ctrl-S, it can take 10 seconds or more before it actually starts the save, and the blue progress bar at the bottom lurches forward in a way that suggests a less than smooth ride. The cwp file is 423KB -- which is not all that big, but it's more than twice the size of other recent projects of similar weight and specs (all of which stop at the end.)

You could try opening a Blank Project and Selecting All the tracks [Ctrl-A] and then copy and paste them into the new Project and resave. It might be a corrupt project file, sometimes this leaves the corruption behind.

Do you have any MUTED clips?

... or hidden or archieved.

the only thing i changed was using automation on 1 track,

Make sure all envelopes and nodes are visible and no stray nodes are past expected stop time.

Thanks for all the suggestions! And update, FWIW........

The problem with the project not stopping at the end definitely seems related to the presence of muted clips -- when I unmute or delete those clips, the song stops as expected. But other projects that contain way more muted clips than this one does don't have this problem. So there must be something else to it. It doesn't seem to be the length of the clips. But I haven't tried to really figure it out. VERY rarely, it actually DOES stop at the end, even with the muted clips. So whatever it is, it's subtle.

The problem with this project saving very slowly doesn't seem related -- at least not directly -- to the not-stopping problem.

The cwp on this project has gone from under 400kb to nearly 2.5 Mb, but even though I've been working on the song, I've not done anything that I would think could account for that kind of change. I've mostly been moving and copying clips (audio and MIDI) of files that were already in the project -- no new recording, no importing, no new fx or synths, no track bouncing, maybe a few short clip bounces, vocal fixes with V-Vocal (which I bounce-to-clips once I'm done, so I've got no live VV instances, and do not save the project with VV instances), and that's about it. Pretty pedestrian really. There are more total clips, but other than that the weight of the project hasn't changed much. But it's saving slower than ever -- I last timed it at 29 seconds, with most of that time just waiting, as though it's doing calculations or house cleaning.

As was suggested, I did a Select All on this project and copied it into an empty project, which was saved in the same folder, so that it used the identical audio clips. That file saved just about as slowly -- and that's without any of the fx, busses, or instruments from the parent project -- just the clips and markers.

I was able to isolate a track that when deleted let the project save in no time at all. The track consisted of about 3 or 4 clips, all referencing the same wav file. But when I deleted that same track from the parent project file, the project continued to save slowly. For the sake of science, I then emptied each track, one by one, saving between each delete. But the project still took a long time to save. Then I deleted the tracks themselves, and eventually the busses (which cannot be Undone... I had forgotten that!), until it was apparently an empty project. And it still took forever to save. I forgot to make a note of the size of the file after I did this (bad science) and I later overwrote it with a backup I took before I started testing, so I don't know if, or at what point, the file might have shrunk to a more normal size. But there's clearly something weird about this project.

The wav file that seemed to be the culprit (after I copied and pasted to the new project) was the first track I created for the project. It was created when I imported an 11kHz, 16bit mono wave file into my 96/24 song. In Global Options-Audio Data, the File Bit Depth is set to 'Original' (which I don't recall changing from the default.) I wouldn't think that would have anything to do with it, but I'm really just guessing.

For now I'm continuing to use the project, and doing frequent backups. I'll eventually make a new project from the parts of this one that I want to keep.