hi everyone, i hope you all can see the attached screen shot. if you can, does anyone know what this is, i've never seen it before. thanks in advance, it's amazes me how much stuff some of you guys know." />

I am afraid to use the audio cleaner.

This is because the file is used from windows. (Though there is no real reason)
Restart the computer and try again.

ok, thanks, i'll give it a try

I have had that, too. Totally inexplicable.
 
I see you have all your audio files inside the audio subfolder of your project. That's good. (and normal).
 
You can do this more efficiently by creating a new folder, then going to "File > Save As" to save your project into that folder.
Before you hit OK, make sure "Copy all audio with project" is selected. This will copy all USED audio files and leave the abandoned ones behind.
 
The Clean Audio File tool is ancient.
 
It made sense in days when hard drives were small and we all tried saving space by putting all audio files in global Audio folders in the hope of re-using clips over many projects.
 
Before it cleans, it tries to find out if any existing Cakewalk project files also use any of your audio files. To do this, it looks absolutely everywhere, on every drive, in every folder (even the Recycling bin!!! It's still Win32 days!!!)  just in case there is a .CWP file lying around that might, just might be using any audio files in your project.
 
That made sense when hard drives were 10-20MB, but intolerable where the average drive is 500GB-1TB in size.
 

holy crap indeed, thanks so much. dontcha think the engineers at CW would be able to figure out that this is an old useless thing? i remember my first CW product was guitar tracks in 2001, it was absolutely necessary to run the file cleaner ALL the time. at that time my OS was millennium and i could see how much more room i got after running it. it's weird that CW is on top of making new stuff but hang on  to crap like that.
thanks again
jp   

Last time I made the mistake of turning the audio cleaner on it found the itunes library and started ploughing through (and listing as unused so OK to delete) all 200GB or so of it.

It would be fine if it only searched directories it was told to. But it doesn't, it just thrashes looking everywhere and by the time it's put a list together the list is so long it's useless.

Yeah, stay away from this guy. I ran it last year playing around and moved all the files it found to the Recycle Bin. Then I ran it's buddy utility (forget the name) to inspect the projects and got a lot of "audio file not found" messages, so restored everything and not used either since.
 
Edit: The other tool was the CWAF tool.

I have been complaining about it since Cakewalk 4.