Please excuse the dumb question, but I recently ran across the manual’s explanation on initializing files. I guess “initialization” in Sonar’s world has more to do with hard disc internal settings than defragmenting song files.
 
Anyway, I was thinking about this some weeks ago and haven’t really found anything definitive yet. For the past 12 years or so I’ve been recording on a Roland 1880. On that unit the “initialize” function serves to clear all the old unused and overwritten data to save disc space. What is the equivalent function for Sonar?  If I overwrite (e.g. I record over multiple takes) that old data is still stored on my hard drive somewhere, right? So, what application or process can I use to clean that up and free up space?
 
Chris

The best way for a single project is to do a "save as" and choose a completely different location - such as your desktop. Make sure "Copy Audio With Project" is checked.

Once this is done, you can delete the original project, then, move your copied project back to where it should be.

• You'll need to do this for every project, so it's time consuming
• You'll need to have the "Per Project" option checked

Bristol, thanks for the info....I'll do that....It sort of suck though....All in all, I've found Sonar to be great, but this is a shortcoming IMO….How is it that developers in 2012 couldn’t have addressed issues that were addressed in all in one DAWs in the 90’s? I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand a lot of this tech and the details behind it, but you’d think they would have an “initialize” process similar to that on the old Roland units (1680, 1880, 1824, 2000, 2400, and 2480).
 
Chris
 

There has always been (for years) a way within Cake / Sonar / Pro Audio, to delete orphaned wav files. This does what you want. I think it is called 'clean audio disk' or something like that. Search the help files for that term. (Although I almost never do it {clean audio disk}, because disc space is cheap now, and mainly, I am scared to death that it will accidentally delete a file by mistake!) - Ed

ed97643


There has always been (for years) a way within Cake / Sonar / Pro Audio, to delete orphaned wav files. This does what you want. I think it is called 'clean audio disk' or something like that. Search the help files for that term. (Although I almost never do it {clean audio disk}, because disc space is cheap now, and mainly, I am scared to death that it will accidentally delete a file by mistake!) - Ed 
 

Wow! Awesome!!!...Thanks for the heads up..... I'll look for that tonight
 
Chris

Hmmm. Tread with caution.

In fact I'd do a full backup of your entire projects drive before you start this.

I tried it years ago and found it to be extremely long winded so I haven't used it since.

If it works, great!

I've used the 'clean audio folder' utility for years without any problems.  
 
Here's a tip that always works on my system; if you have several hardrives it will take a while to search through them but after that it will take considerably less time to search through the next opened project (unless you re-boot of course)


I always back up finished projects to several backup drives plus also to better quality dvd+r's.
Remember hardives can fail & should be run every so often. I spin them up at least once a year.