Hi,
 
I've got a few old laptops with older versions of Sonar and was wanting to delete some of the audio files off the hard drive. Problem is, Sonar is only allowing me to delete either all files, or one file at a time.  Provided I am 100% certain of which audio files I want to delete, can I go directly into Windows explorer and delete the files, and then delete the associated clips inside the respective Sonar project(s)?  Or is that going to get something out of sync?

Thanks,
 
     Sonic

There is a clean audio files function in Sonar. It takes quite a while for it to run but it does work. Be sure to carefully review what it's about to delete because once you've done so, the files are no longer recoverable. They don't go into your recycling bin, they are gone. There was a thread recently where the user lost some files he actually was working on in the process.

SonicExplorer
Hi,
 
I've got a few old laptops with older versions of Sonar and was wanting to delete some of the audio files off the hard drive. Problem is, Sonar is only allowing me to delete either all files, or one file at a time.  Provided I am 100% certain of which audio files I want to delete, can I go directly into Windows explorer and delete the files, and then delete the associated clips inside the respective Sonar project(s)?  Or is that going to get something out of sync?

Thanks,
 
     Sonic

yes. that will work. no sync problems.

Thanks guys.  The question came about because of this:  I noticed on the early versions of Sonar (on my old laptops) when I "undo" a take both the clip and audio file are removed.  But I if I just delete the clip, the audio file seems to stick around permanently.  So throughout the course of a project I end up with a bunch of orphaned files.  The "Clean Audio Folder" function only seems to allow for deleting one file at a time or ALL audio files in the system.  Neither of those is a viable solution if I have, say, a few dozen orphaned files in a specific project I want to get rid of.  So the only option I thought of was to go directly into Windows explorer, locate the files (which is often easy to do based on date of session) and delete them directly.  I just wanted to make sure this wasn't going to trip up Sonar and get it out of sync somehow.
 
All that said, if I'm overlooking something please let me know.  (For example, if there were a setting somewhere to "delete associated audio file when deleting clips" type of setting that would avoid this problem altogether)
 
Thanks,
 
Sonic

My preferred way of doing this is to Save As the project to another folder, being sure to select Copy All Audio With Project. Then, the audio file in the new folder will contain only files the project is actually using.
 
Delete the original folder, and copy the Save As folder back to the original location. Done.
 
Sometime this can free up surprising amounts of storage space.
 
As I've mentioned a few times on here, I once deleted all my audio files, for all my projects, using Clean Audio Files. I'm sure it was my fault, but it happened, and I don't want it to happen again.

The Clean Audio Folder function is from the DOS days, is slow, confusing and has caught out everyone new to Sonar at least once.
 
vanceen is right:
 
Go to "Save As" and save the project into a new folder.
Before you do, make sure " Copy All Audio With Project" is selected.

dlesaux
There was a thread recently where the user lost some files he actually was working on in the process.

I've been hearing reports like this since the ProAudio 9 days.

FWIW, I believe there is the option after the app scans everything to copy all the files (before deleting).
I just did this and stored all those orphaned (50 gigs) files on a backup drive just in case.