Hi,
 
I have been recording some of my band practices on a QSC Touchmix mixer, then importing the files in Sonar X3.
In Sonar, I have made a rough mix of the recording and would like to use this as a default mix for future recordings, so it won't be necessary to start a mix from scratch every time.
 
How should I do this? I have tried a few things with no success.
 
With a new recording, I have copied the cwp file of the rough mix into a new folder and copied the new audio files into an Audio subfolder. I renamed the files to match the name as the previous ones in the old Audio folder, the one of the previous recording. However, when I open Sonar, it still opens with the old rough mix files. IOW, Sonar finds the files in the old folder on the drive instead of the files in the Audio folder where the cwp file is located. Is there a way to tell Sonar to use relative subfolders and not go looking elsewhere on the drive for the files?
 
The other thing I tried is using a template because I thought that a template saved only the settings of everything and not the audio files. However, Sonar saves the audio also, so that doesn't work.
 
I am certain there must be a way to do this. Can anybody help me with this?
 
Dan
 

try this
 
edit select-all then delete all tracks
-then save the project as CWT=template..
-then do (edit-undo =delete tracks)
-then save your project as (normal)CWP
 
 
martin

Hi. Save it as a Project Template.
When doing a save as, there are options under where you write the name. Change that to Template, and save.
All the best.

Thanks for your replies.
 
Ok, yes that will work, however, it will be necessary to import every single track for each recording.
In this case, it would have to be done very often and time consuming.
 
What I thought I could do, and seem to remember doing this with older versions of years ago, is to have the same name for the audio files and change the audio files to newer ones. Sonar thinks it's the same song. I believe there was a slight issue of having the length of the initial project at least as long as the new one, and erasing the wav renderings in the Cake folder, but after that, it worked back then, or is my memory playing tricks on me?
 
Does anyone know if one can tell Sonar to not remember the audio files' full file path and just use the "Audio" relative subfolder in form where the cwp file resides? I thought maybe in an "ini" file, but haven't found it yet.
 
Dan

Your's is a situation many of us who record live bands have.  There is no easy answer because ultimately what we need is a "overlay" template. A way to mix song 1 save all those settings , and apply it to song 2 and 3 and so on. Sonar, and as far as I can tell, no DAW has this feature. 
 
All you can do is as you've already discovered, is make a blank project that you manually dump the audio into. Or use track templates. 
You situation is better because your audio will have to be transferred anyhow. I would recommend using my method#2 Don't transfer all the songs until you have song #1 dialed in. 
 
There are a few solutions, I'll show you the 2 I have used. 
 
Method #1  This works bet when the songs are already in Sonar. 
Get song 1 sounding good then I saved each track as a track template naming them. 
I then opened song #2 and inserted each track template below it's equivalent. 
Now I just drag and drop each original track to the template track and delete the blank oriinals. 
 
method #2
Just import song 1 and get it sounding the way you want, Save it. 
Now delete the audio and SAVE AS  (and here's what I do), CWP song 2. 
You can also use a template.  Really the same as saving as a CWP. 
Now you have a bank project with all the settings to dump the audio tracks from song 2 into. Save.
Now delete the audio again and now SAVE AS song 3 and so on. 
 
What I miss is for years I mixed down from my 12 Track system through my Yamaha 01v. 
It was soooo easy to record a live band, get song 1 sounding good and now all you did was play all the songs through the mixer recording fader moves to midi via the Atari, and sit back and let it roll to the master tape. This results in a great mix for to whole album.
 
I guess the equivalent would involve using a multi channel audio interface/ mixer like a Behringer X32.  

I worked on this again just now and am making progress, although I am not certain yet to have it all solved.
It involves using always the same "reference" folder to start mixing your songs, then re-saving a copy to a new folder.
 
1) Once you have mixed the first song, you can save a copy of it elsewhere on your drive along with all the audio files. This will now be your working copy for this song for future mix tweaking.
That leaves you with your original mix in the "reference"  folder to modify with another song's  data. So,
 
2) You replace your first song's wav files with your next song's files in the "reference" Audio folder. If the wav files are shorter, Sonar will replace the missing lengths with silence, but doesn't change the recorded parts.
You must have the same numbers of audio files from your 2nd song as the first one and all the files must have the same name and also the same length, or be shorter than the first song.
 
3) Open your first song in the "reference" folder which now points to the replaced wav files and then re-save a copy of it with the name of the newer song elsewhere on your drive for future tweaking of this 2nd song.
 
4) Repeat  2) and 3) for all your other songs.
 
The only other part you need to be aware is that your first mix should not contain any edits or automation, just eqs, effects, i.e. mixing info. When we make an edit, Sonar saves the edits as new wav files which may be a problem. So your mix should not have edits before re-saving a copy of it to a new folder. That shouldn't be a problem anyway, because future songs will not be needing these edits anyways.
 
Seems to work in my case, however I have only tried it once to confirm the principle.
The other operation is renaming your audio files so the names match.
To do this, I just use the multi-rename function in FreeCommander, the windows explorer replacement I use.
 
Cheers,
Dan