Since cakewalk support has not responded to my emails, I thought I'd try here.

We were on the last song of a 10 day stretch of recording with a new client, when in the middle of an overdub, Sonar reported the audio drive needed to be defragmented. I saved the file, exited Sonar, and checked the drive. It only had about 6 megs left, so I freed up some space and then tried to reopen the project. Sonar reported the the file was "not a valid Sonar 6.x file..." and refused to open it. All the .wav files are fine, just the .cwb file is bad.

Any ideas of how to get this back working? There are way too many tracks and layers to try and rebuild it by hand.

I was surprised by the defrag error message. In the past, Sonar has given me messages about low disk space, but never this defrag message. I've also never had it corrupt a file during a save.

Any ideas of where to start would be greatly appreciated. The client isn't happy to say the least!

************ UPDATE 12/14/07 *************

My mistake on calling it a .CWB bundle file. It's actually a .CWP project file. My bad!

Hi Bruce:
Sorry about your problems.
But why are you using bundle files for to save your projects? This archive type is well known as problematic and it is used mainly for backup of full projects (despite I can´t to recommend it neither for this purpose). The usual way for to save running projects is the project file (.cwp), the more secure form of to work daily.
I don´t know how to recover the bundle file, but you can to try open the offended file in other computer which have Sonar (only a shot in the dark, but who know ...). If nobody in the forum have a solution, you can to contact Cakewalk support for more info.
Greetings and good luck.

can you burn the .cwb to a disc and/or export it to another drive? then try opening it into sonar. try renaming it too.

I'm afraid your project is most likely lost. I've had that happen before and there has been long threads on it here with no-one coming up with a solution or a cause. It's just one of those things that happen and unfortunately you're probably going to have to re-do it by hand... Sucks muchly, I had to do the same thing to a project a few months ago.

Only thing I can suggest is trying to open it in safe mode, but I doubt you will get any luck there. Backups are the only way to go here. After you record all your takes, make a backup project, cause these things just happen sometimes. No getting around it. Good luck.

Backup after every session and use CWP files and per project folders. Its known that CWB files can be easily corrupted and if one little file gets corrupted, the whole thing is lost. Not so for CWP files. Sorry
Cj

Yeah as CJ said, use per project folders, they are the most reliable and least likely to become corrupt. Also if a re-build does need to be done you have all your audio all ready organised per project.

Try opening it in safe mode. Hold down the shift key while clicking File-Open.

What they just said

"It only had about 6 megs left" ... hmmm.. 6 gigs or was it really just 6 megs? that's the way to get into some serious DAW troubles...

Thanks for all the responses.

I've been in Europe for a few weeks and haven't been able to try any of the suggested fixes. My orginal post was incorrect as the file in question is a .CWP project file, not a .CWB bundle file.

And yes, there were only 6 megs of disk space left, not 6 gigs. I'm surprised I never got a low disk space warning as I would usually get from Sonar.

I do backup after every session. This was during the first session for the song that this happened, so there was no backup yet. Bummer!

Thanks for all your input. I still haven't had a single response from Cakewalk support on this. They have always been very quick to respond in the past.

This changes everything, since you made a mistake and said originally CWB, but now thats its a CWP file, you can isolate the file thats giving you the error and just move it out of the project or delete it, and then you should be able to open it.
Cj