In the last couple of days I have been saving my work, then closing out of Cakewalk Pro Audio 8. When I reopen Cakewalk and click on the file I have saved, a window pops up saying "Failed To Open Document". Never had this problem before. Today I tried saving a new project to both the hard drive as well as the floppy drive on my computer, but neither file would open when I closed and then reopened Cakewalk. For a quick test I saved a very simple file with 4 quarter notes, closed Cakewalk, and then reopened it and was able to open that file. I'm using Windows 2000 on an IBM A20m Laptop.

Thanks,
Bill

Hello:


Find out if your file(s) are corrupt:

In Windows explorer...right click on the file...go to properties.

The file type should be "Cakewalk project"
The file extension should be .WRK
The file attributes should not be checked except for "archive"
The file size should be greater than 0

Some things to try:

Try dragging and dropping the file to another folder...does it copy OK?
Try renaming the file to a name less than 8 characters long.
Try running scandisk (thorough).
Try opening the file on another computer with cakewalk.

Hi, and thanks very much for replying. I've replied below to your comments...

The file type should be "Cakewalk project"
The file extension should be .WRK
The file attributes should not be checked except for "archive"
The file size should be greater than 0

All looks good here. File is 28.2 Kb, Cakewalk Project, .WRK extension. only "archive" is checked.

Some things to try:

Try dragging and dropping the file to another folder...does it copy OK?

Drag & drops fine to another folder. Just for kicks tried opening it from the folder I dropped it into, but get same "Document Failed To Open" message

Try renaming the file to a name less than 8 characters long.

Did that as well, still get same message when I try to open it.

Try running scandisk (thorough).

I couldn't find Scandisk on my laptop that has Windows 2000, but ran Scandisk in thourough mode on the floppy on my older desktop that has Windows 95 and found no problems. Does Windows 2000 have Scandisk on it? If so, where is it? I looked under Programs/Accesories/System Tools, but couldn't see Scandisk. Is Disk Cleanup the same thing as Scandisk?

Try opening the file on another computer with cakewalk.

I had it saved on a floppy, so tried to open that on an the desktop computer that had Cakewalk Pro Audio 8 on it, and it froze up. I also tried copying the file from my laptop with the new name with less than 8 characters, but it froze up as well.

Any other ideas you have are greatly appreciated, and thanks again for your time.

Best regards,
Bill

Bill:

It doesn't seem that your .WRK file is corrupt...but the size of it (28.8k) seems extremely large compared to mine, which average about 1 k per minute of song length.

Was the project around 28 minutes long?

If so, then there could be a buffer/cache setting in CW that will remedy the problem. Try these: (first make note of current settings)

Change wave buffer size
Change wave que buffers
Change file I/O buffers and file I/O buffer size
Change enable read cache and enable write cache



If not, then there could be some garbage that got saved in the file and it is almost impossible to get out...or possibly a virus attached to/destroyed the file.


*****Also, is "Failed to Open Document" the only error you get?...or are there any other errors. It could be that one of the supporting files for your project is corrupt, but from my experience with a hard disk problem about a year ago, it will usually tell you which file it cannot find when this happens.

The song is about 4 minutes, but it does have 3 tracks of keyboards, a track of drums, track of guitsr, track of bass, track of hand claps. Was that 1K/minute figure per track? Would you still recommend changing the buffer/cache settings?

Unfortunately the only error message I get is "Document failed to open". I save things every few minutes when I work on a project, and it seems to save no problems, so it's kind of a shock when I can't open up the file after I close and reopen Cakewalk. :>(

Thanks again for the time,
Bill

Bill:

Compare the size of the file in question to another project you have done with the same instruments/length. If it still seems too large, then it may be damaged in some way. Most of my songs are 3 to 4 minutes with up to 12 audio tracks and none of them have a .WRK file larger than 5k. It wouldn't hurt to enlarge the buffers...if it doesn't help, you can always put the original values back.

The only other thing that I can suggest is to run a good virus scan/clean program on your files. Also, run a thorough scandisk (double click on "My Computer", right click on the hard drive icon, go to properties, click on the "Tools" tab, and click "Check Now".

If it still won't open, the long shot is to use Norton Disk Editor. I have had limited success fixing files with it...most of the time the file gets screwed up worst than it started, so always work on a copy of the file and not the original. To edit the file back to life almost requires that you have another file (in perfect shape) almost identicle to the problem file that you can look at and compare to.

Cakewalk has a tool called "Clean Audio Disk" (under "Tools"). It will find temporary .WAV files that it uses as undo files. If you have the patience, you can play each one of them...you may find some of the tracks to your project there, and rebuild from scratch.

It looks like the same size as my other files about this length. I wonder why my files are so much bigger. I usually run Norten Internet Security and Spybot once a week or so, but I'm due to do all that, so I'll give that a try. Thanks for guiding me through how to run Scandisk. It's amazing how much stuff I still have to learn about some basic computer functions. I'll try that as well. Thanks too for telling me about the Cakewalk tool. I may rummage around there as well. If worse comes to worse I can always go back to my older desktop and use Cakewalk from there until I either get a new laptop or figure out what is going on. I really appreciate all the help & time, and I'll let you know if I find out what the problem is.

Best regards,
bill

Hey Bill,

I had the same problem. My WRK file couln't be opened no matter what I did.

THEN... I tried opening them with a newer version of Cakewalk Pro Audio.
In this case Version 9.  The files opened without any problem and I've been
using 9 without trouble ever since.
 
You could try aquiring your own Pro Audio 9 or you could email me your WRK
and then I could sent them back as MIDI files.

cheers

-Skrie