this one's got me. I am unable to open a project i saved last week. I've disabled scanning VST on startup (Sonar v8.5 itself opens fine) I hold shift when i open and even when not loading any plugins it stalls at 40% opening. unless i'm mistaken, I recall there are a couple of ways to open a bad project, one is holding down shift when opening but i dont know of any others. Any advice appreciate, thanks all

That's the only way I know of Steve.

What does the project contain?

If it's all audio you should be able to rebuild it from the wavs

thanks for the reply. its mainly WAV data with the typical plugins and some V vocal stuff but has midi data and softsynths too. weirdly i walked away from the PC and it opened after about 20minutes so i immediately saved as a new file name and again it stalled at 40% upon saving. it also seemed i had some hidden audiosnap markers enabled that prevented me from saving the project as a bundle. Once i managed to disable all audiosnap data the file saved and opened fine, normal and in bundle format. strange as i have never used audiosnap, ever! (perhaps i unknowingly enabled it somewhere?)

I'd stay away from Bundle files mate - they are know to be extremely buggy, and in severe cases can result in the whole project being lost (ring any bells?)

Just save as normal CWP's and you'll be fine, and make sure:

a) you have a good backup plan going
b) you use "Per Project" folders
c) you save regularly, preferably with a different name each time

i only saved as a bundle so i had an emergency backup whilst i tried to fix the issue. its rare that i use bundles, unless i'm having a dabble on another PC. ive never been a fan of the "auto save" feature and regularly hit the save button (past experience learnt the hard way) Might be a good idea to perhaps make daily saves under a different name then? cheers for the tips!

one last note, now all seems ok: I just noticed that the few projects ive been working which are all similar in content and length are between 2-4 Mb in size (.cwp files) but the "corrupt" one was 25Mb in size. would this be due to the (unwanted) audiosnap data?