A bundle file will always be much larger as it contains all the projects audio files.

A Cakewalk project cwp.file doesn't contain any audio. Everything else but the audio.

You could try opening the project and saving it with a new name and see if that reduces the file size.

Whenever I work with Audiosnap, Transient markers or Melodyne, I always bounce to clip when I've done.

Bristol_Jonesey
Whenever I work with Audiosnap, Transient markers or Melodyne, I always bounce to clip when I've done.

^^This. These are editing functions, not playback functions. If you think you'll change your mind later about wanting to re-edit a track, clone it, archive it (so it doesn't use CPU), and hide it (to avoid visual clutter).

NeckHumbucker
BUT this is HUGE bug. 

It's not a problem if you know the cause. If you want to get rid of transient markers and slip-edits after using AS to split at transients just uncheck the Enable box in the Audiosnap section of the Clip properties with all the clips still selected immediately after splitting, and then right-click the selection and Apply Trimming. This gets rid of all the AS markers and slip-edit boundary tracking.
 
Having hundred or thousands of clips referencing small segments of each audio file will still make the the file larger, but not as gargantuan as having slip-edited clips with AS enabled on every clip.
 
A feature that allows doing this automatically as an option for Split Beats to Clips would be good to have.

brundlefly

NeckHumbucker
BUT this is HUGE bug. 

It's not a problem if you know the cause. If you want to get rid of transient markers and slip-edits after using AS to split at transients just uncheck the Enable box in the Audiosnap section of the Clip properties with all the clips still selected immediately after splitting, and then right-click the selection and Apply Trimming. This gets rid of all the AS markers and slip-edit boundary tracking.
 
Having hundred or thousands of clips referencing small segments of each audio file will still make the the file larger, but not as gargantuan as having slip-edited clips with AS enabled on every clip.
 
A feature that allows doing this automatically as an option for Split Beats to Clips would be good to have.

It is a problem because it is a bug, it is not a feature that I just discovered how to use. 
I do exactly how you described: Use AS to split audio, disable AS, trim and bounce. 
BUT that doesn't get rid of the AS info. That is the problem, because it is a bug.
 
Whenever you select Audio Transients in edit filter, audio gets analyzed for AS automatically, and even after you turn off AS at clip level, and change edit filter back to Clip, that AS info stays in the file, and then gets corrupt. 
 
and This was not a problem in earlier releases, only in X3, so that again makes it a problem that needs be fixed.
Any serious software company would take a data corruption problem very seriously, but that doesn't seem to be the case with Sonar. Look-and-feel is more important apparently.
 

NeckHumbucker
Any serious software company would take a data corruption problem very seriously, but that doesn't seem to be the case with Sonar. Look-and-feel is more important apparently.

 
There have been hundreds of fixes and optimizations in the transition from X3 to SONAR 2015 and during the past year, which gives a clear indication of Cakewalk's priorities post-X3/post-acquisition. If you truly believe that AudioSnap corrupted your data, then send the project to Cakewalk for analysis. If you don't clean up editing functions after editing has occurred, the expected result is that eventually the data will become too large to handle. Similarly, every time you bounce a track, a new file is created and that swells your audio folder. However, you could not do deep undos or have an edit history without that data. 
 
If what you're saying is there's no way to strip AudioSnap data after doing AudioSnap operations, I have not found that to be the case but then again, I'm using Platinum so things might have been different in X3.
 

Whenever you select Audio Transients in edit filter, audio gets analyzed for AS automatically, and even after you turn off AS at clip level, and change edit filter back to Clip, that AS info stays in the file, and then gets corrupt.

 
I believe that changing Edit Filter back to clip does not delete the AudioSnap data by design. To remove AudioSnap, Acidization transient markers, Melodyne metadata, and the like, you need to bounce the clip to itself. If bouncing a clip to itself does not eliminate the metadata, that would indeed be a bug and Cakewalk should investigate it.
 

Hmmm...I just tried an experiment with Platinum. Opened a song, changed all clips to Transients, then opened up AudioSnap for the various tracks and re-quantized them so AudioSnap would have to do some "work." Then, I re-saved as a new .cwp file and the file size was the same. Not sure why. I do know there were changes to AudioSnap between X3 and SONAR 2015. I think someone from Cakewalk, or a user who knows more about this than I do, will need to weigh in.

I have a similar problem ...i do some edits, and then later i delete several tracks making the song smaller, but the newly saved file is much larger than the original and sonar starts working very slowly and sometimes hangs for five or more minutes. How do you remove the edit history? because I think this would allow the file size to get smaller?