difficulty opening 8.5 and earlier files

Try building a project in X1 and entering just the audio and Midi data into the proper tracks without plugins or synths. Then add the plugins and synths needed. Save with a new name.

I'm sorry but I dont understand this advise.  Can you please explain?

I am not able to open files created in older versions of cakewalk.

It's likely you're missing many of the plugins that were used in those earlier projects. That could partially be due to only installing 64-bit X1 and partially due to plugins that were shipped with 8.5 but not with X1.

I would suggest installing SONAR 8.5 (32-bit) on the new machine. Make sure you can still open the old projects that way, and bring over any missing third-party plugins that SONAR complains about. Once you've successfully opened the project in 8.5 on that machine, the only hurdle should be 32-bit plugins that don't work well with bitbridge, which are few.

If you have some objection to installing 8.5 on this computer, you can always start SONAR up in safe mode and bypass loading all plugins, but you'd then have to replace and reconfigure them. That could be a time-consuming PIA if you have a lot of them or if they're extensively automated. It'll be far more convenient if you can avoid that.

Although moving a project to X1 should be no problem most of the time, I have to agree with Jonesey's strategy of completing previous projects in 8.5 and reserving X1 for new projects. It doesn't hurt anything to keep multiple versions of SONAR installed and the extra disk space they take up is trivial.

That is awsome!.  the shift thing worked and even if I have to reassociate all the midi tracks its no huge deal.  all my plugins are better than they were back then anyway.  I think a big culprit is that I never reinstalled guitar rig 3 and some other older NI komplete instruments since I would never use them now.  I know several of the programs used guitar rig.

before I start looking for my 8.5 install disks Im going to try installing gr3 and the old versions of kontakt.  we'll see how that works.

thanks so much for your responses.  I was sure that I read somewhere X1 could not be on the same machine as 8.5.  I was afraid to try that and I never new about the shift thing either.

Jeff