What are WOV files

These .WOV files have nothing to do with any of your project data, so if you delete them there's no need to worry. The files simply contain 'pictures' of the waveforms from any and all the audio data contained in your Cakewalk projects. Keeping these 'pictures' on file allows Sonar to quickly 'draw' your audio waveforms on the screen, which would otherwise take much longer.

It is best to have a large picture cache. In the aud.ini

PicCacheMB=500

works for me.

When the picture cache fills up there can be problems. As you can see, these files can get large, and if your project has many tracks with many takes, or you open several large projects at the same time, it can fill up your picture cache. This is not good.

ORIGINAL: rchristiejr

Why is it best to have a large picture cache?

Two things here..one is entirely technical and the other one is just a "maybe"..just another way to try and avoid problems if some bug exists there (still no proofs..there were many posts about this in other WOV/pic cache threads here)

1 - You don't want a single project (or a few of them that you load all at once) to get to the point where it has enough wav files recorded that their WOV's size would exceed that "PicCacheMB=" value.

Sonar starts deleting the older wov files when it reaches that limit..that means you might have slow performance and waiting times (for redrawing of wav files) just because Sonar will try getting rid of wov files that belong to the project. you DON'T want that to happen.

If you load another big project later on you might have to sit and wait (or try to work meanwhile) until Sonar will recalculate new wov files ..maybe they already got deleted because of the pic cach limit again. For loading other projects quickly you must have a big enough cache so sonar won't delete those wov files. 500MB is a setting that could be "too large" for some (there's no such thing today with the big harddrrives;) and too small for others but it's a good place to start with..depends on the nature of the work

2 - Avoiding constant or frequent deleting and re-creating wov files could help Sonar work correctly with this cache some say..maybe the caching system is "healthier" when the size limits are bigger.. IF there's something really wrong there even the opposite of that could be true! (have less wov files for a cleaner act? probably not)

there are some cases where things might go wrong..it's like keeping a database..there's a chance (nobody knows for sure) that Sonar has a less than 100% robust wov caching system.. broken "links" or references to wov files, dupicate names or any other corruption of this "databse" - whatever the reason is users got sometimes wav files that won't "show" all of a sudden and some other weird stuff.. nobody tested this thoroughly as far as I know and that's fine really..heh..CW should test such things and not the users.

Finding and reading those older threads might help.. at least for finding workarounds when things seem to be weird.

you might want to increase it past 500, you really need to delete some after a while,

Of course..but Cakewalk never said that! (no need to delete anything..it's 100%robust!! that's the conclusion from never saying you have to delete those)
so, many users out there don't come here and read all this.. like other THINGS i complained about (the AUD.INI thread) that must be done outside of Sonar this should never happen - it's like a software that get updates for years (heh..this is actually the case) and has more and more patches, tweaks that every used "MUST" know about..who wants to be a guru? it's all somewhat documented here and there (readme files for each release) but all this should be inside the app itslef..CW should never leave those piles of things to do there..IMHO