Trying to recover bad project...

I recently found one of my old bundle project files (.bun) that I made with Pro Audio 9, and excitedly tried to open it with SONAR 8... only to be told, "The file you are trying to open is not compatible with this version of SONAR." What...!?

Okay, don't panic, I thought. I tried opening it with my copy of Pro Audio 9.03 and 9.01 (what it was created with) and both say they're unable to read the file.

I don't know what the problem is, but I'm sure it's something ridiculously stupid that SONAR refuses to overlook, I'd bet >99% of the file is perfectly fine.

Please, PLEASE tell me there is a way to recover Cakewalk projects, this is the only copy of this song that exists and is probably my best work. Isn't there a way to at least extract the audio from the file? I'm willing to pay $200 through PayPal to anyone that can recover it.

Thanks for any help.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?yrzyti2xmy1 (50MB)

Hi Dave, it's 50MB. Take a look at my first post, I edited it to include a download link. Thanks a lot if you're able to help.

I don't know Dave, maybe. I tried renaming it rar, zip, etc and opening it with archive programs like 7-zip, and the others. But they all just say it's not an archive. Too bad Cakewalk's formats aren't documented so we can know how they work.

Do you think I should try contacting support? I thought about that before posting this but I have a strong feeling they'll basically tell me I'm SOL.

Hi rstollen, thanks for checking it out for me. Basically what happened was I did this about 8 years ago and burned this BUN as a backup onto a CD. Well my harddrive crashed so I lost the original project and I also managed to lose the CD so I had no copy of it. Just recently I found the CD which is why I'm hoping there's a way to fix the file. Basically I'm trying to say my memory of the file is what I remember from 8 years ago so YMMV.

The file was created with Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.01, there's probably about 11-14 MIDI tracks and probably about another 3 or 4 audio *TRACKS*. I believe the total song length is about 4 minutes. While I don't really remember track names, I do remember what some of the banks and patch names were as I have some of the same synths as I did then. (Don't know if this is helpful or not, but I'm hoping it is) One should be bank 0, patch 63 (Harp), another is 0, patch 01 "Acoustic Piano", 0, 79 "Koto", I know one of them is an FM bell, not sure which since I have a lot, probably 3, D19 "FM Water Bell", there should be one called "Power chord" or something similar as well.

As far as audio *CLIPS* my memory is fuzzy, but if it's like I did similar projects at the time there should be probably about 3 or so tracks that are roughly the length of the project, one is obviously the bass gt as you said, there'll probably be one that's drums and maybe backing instruments and then probably another that's all melodies. There will probably be about 3-10 other short (1-16 second) clips that are mostly sound effects like cymbals or 'spacey' kinds of sounds. Note there are no vocals. The "big" clips are the most important of the audio. My (uneducated) guess is you should have around 7-11 minutes of TOTAL audio for the project (if you put each clip end-to-end).

The MIDI is far more important than the audio as all the audio is just recorded MIDI (excluding the bass). It drives me crazy that only about 90KB of this file have the MIDI information and yet SONAR just 'can't' extract that.

If you have more questions please ask and I will do my best to answer.

Thanks for your help.

Okay, good luck. Thanks for checking it out.