I'm pretty sure there must be some of you out there who are like me in that the process of composing and arranging in Sonar involves a lot of experimenting - shuffling clips around, substituting one clip for another, playing with multiple variations of musical phrases and song structure etc. So what I generally end up with is a mess in my track window, with clips lying all over the place, some piled up in tracks past the end of the song, some stored in the blocks of silence at the beginning of the track, some muted and lying around randomly. It makes me feel very disorganized and to be honest my heart sinks sometimes when I open a project and see all this clutter. It makes it hard to get an overview of the song structure and distracts me to the point where I find myself aching for some kind of tidy "storage solution" for unused and inactive clips that I'm keeping. 
 
So 3 things that I've toyed with are: 
 
1) Creating silent tracks for clip storage. I create one under each track, and move any clips I'm not using into them. It's a good idea in theory, but in practice I find that they quickly fill up and it's easy to lose track of which clips are where. Plus there's lots of horizontal scrolling involved in moving and retrieving the clips. Sometimes I want to swap a clip in the active track with a clip in the storage track and find myself horizontally scrolling a long way just to find an empty spot to move the first clip while I retrieve the second. It gets old pretty quickly. 
 
2) Dragging clips into a folder in the browser. This seems like the best solution, but I've found dragging MIDI clips into the browser to be temperamental and buggy in Sonar. For instance, if you drop a named MIDI clip into a folder it uses the clip name for the file name, but when you drag that clip back into Sonar it ignores the file name and just calls it "track 1." This completely defeats the purpose of organizing clips with names. 
 
3) Storing clips in take lanes. This is something I tried tonight. I've never used take lanes before - I don't do any comping of audio takes, for instance. I'm mainly a MIDI guy and just want to use them to store spare clips. But this evidently doesn't work because when you collapse the take lanes, Sonar piles all the clips on top of each other and the one that's visible in the track isn't necessarily the one you have unmuted (unless I'm misunderstanding how they work). 
 
So does anyone have any other ideas? Some feature of Sonar that I'm evidently blind to? To be honest I reeeeeally wish Sonar had something like Pro Tools' clip list, a little pop up window which lists all of your clips by name, from which you can drag clips into tracks. This is absolutely ideal and it's one of the biggest things I miss about Pro Tools, in that I felt so much more organized when arranging a tune. In fact I'm going to submit a feature request right now....

Ever thought of hiring a Personal Assistant/Organizer to run your affairs?
 
I like tidiness. I make folders for each major group: Bass, Drums, Guitars, Orchestra, Vocals, etc.
 
Any erroneous tracks not needed eventually get deleted.
 
I also Bounce To Tracks after editing clips.
 
If I make major changes to the mix I always save the latest copy to another file so if I mess it up too much or abandon what ultimately proved to be a good idea I can go back to an older file and start over.

I guess creating track folders is a good idea in terms of organizing my storage lanes. The only trouble being that you have to open the folder every time you want to edit the track. 

soens
If I make major changes to the mix I always save the latest copy to another file so if I mess it up too much or abandon what ultimately proved to be a good idea I can go back to an older file and start over.

There is a setting under preferences to have versions of your project saved at intervals as you work on it so that you can go back and view your project at a particular point in time. I don't mean that it keeps a single backup. I mean that once an hour or so, it saves off another copy of the file all-together so that after 12 hours, you have 12 points in time you could return to.
 
This would be useful if you knew the particular point in time you were looking for. it isn't really a way to organize your clips, which is what you are seeking.

How do you view these versions? I have this option checked, but don't see how to view or revert back.

Grem, you have to go to the folder where the project files are. You should see a number of files and they should all have timestamps on them that let you know the last saved time.
 
You then open the project for the version you are interested in.
 
To avoid making prior versions of the project unusable, you should not remove unused wav files because they might be used in a prior version of the project. I think that this is part of the reason for the 'clean audio' function taking so long. It tries to ensure that you don't remove files referenced by other cakewalk project files.

I avoid the mess by taking more time in the composing phase of the project to work out the arrangement.
 
Then I create new tracks of each instrument that needs it to play in the finalized arrangement.
 
That may not work for all styles but it works for me as I try to go for an organic sounding performance.

I make notes on each take lane then clone everything and hide the original tracks with the track manager. Then I clean up and edit the clones how I want. If I decide to go another way I just access the original tracks and take what I need. If I end up with variations that I want to a/b the variations get a new track.

Tom Riggs
I avoid the mess by taking more time in the composing phase of the project to work out the arrangement.
 
Then I create new tracks of each instrument that needs it to play in the finalized arrangement.
 
That may not work for all styles but it works for me as I try to go for an organic sounding performance.

Yeah I think my creativity is a little too haphazard for such forward planning....I almost never know what I'm going to end up with when I start a project. Usually I'll be banging away on the keyboard or my guitar and think "oo that sounds nice...must record it for posterity" and so I'll create a project and record what is usually a few bars at most. Then things kind of grow in all different directions from there and get reworked and shuffled endlessly until what's beginning to look like a tune emerges. I hate to use the old monkeys banging away at typewriters analogy (it's offensive to monkeys) but that's me to a tee...

Beepster
I make notes on each take lane then clone everything and hide the original tracks with the track manager. Then I clean up and edit the clones how I want. If I decide to go another way I just access the original tracks and take what I need. If I end up with variations that I want to a/b the variations get a new track.

Another way of doing it....I think everyone has their own improvs and workarounds to make up for the fact that Sonar does not have a centralized depository for storing and organizing clips. There is so much they could do in this respect to make organization easier. I'm thinking a clip list which could be organized into folders. You could even group clips into phrases or structures (verse, chorus, bridge 1, bridge 2 etc) which could then be dragged into the clips pane. The way it is now, you sometimes find yourself having to drag-copy a huge chunk of clips over long horizontal distances. I'd love to be able to lasso a part of the song, drag it into the clip list, give it a name (e.g. "intro 1"), go back and create some variation in it, drag it into the clip list again and give it another name ("intro 2") etc. 
 
I guess this is a more modular approach to arranging music that would probably suit someone who's into electronic composition rather than organic performances with real instruments. But it's obvious from a lot of their free content giveaways that Cakewalk is pushing for more of an EDM user base, and I don't blame them given that EDM and other forms of synthesized music represent a huge % of today's DAW market.