tenfoot
Quite often when you delete audio from a track it remains in the audio folder, and I have always found the clean audio folder function to be a bit dodgy.

 
When I'm done with a project, I create a "final" folder and "Save As," making sure that "Create One File per Clip" is checked. This saves only the audio that's actually used in the project, not all the parts of the file that aren't. Often a 3 GB project will get slimmed down to a couple hundred megs. Then I delete the original project folder. 
 

Great point re long term storage that any lost data in a bundle causes the entire project to fail Craig - hadn't thought of that, but don't use bundles for that purpose anyway. I would hate to see the write bundle function disappear though!

 
Yes, the cleanup functionality can be handy. I tend not to think about it because I tend to clean up as I go along.
 

Anderton

tenfoot
Quite often when you delete audio from a track it remains in the audio folder, and I have always found the clean audio folder function to be a bit dodgy.

 
When I'm done with a project, I create a "final" folder and "Save As," making sure that "Create One File per Clip" is checked. This saves only the audio that's actually used in the project, not all the parts of the file that aren't. Often a 3 GB project will get slimmed down to a couple hundred megs. Then I delete the original project.
 

Nice solution Craig - will give it a try:)

Elffin
Should I bounce any tracks that have ussd audiosnap before bundling the file?

Yes!
 
You should ALWAYS bounce any material that AS has been used on

i have probably had 6 or 7 .cwb files become corrupt and unusable since becoming a Cakewalk user in 2007, so i won't use them anymore, and haven't since 2009 (which is when i discovered the bundles i made in '07 & '08 had been corrupted).  i wish someone would invent a utility that fixes corrupt bundles in a way that it would open everything except the corrupting data.  

Have you tried safe mode? All known problems with loading bundles were fixed many years ago.
The only advantages of saving bundles is that you have a single file to send someone and it includes only the data referenced within the project file. One downside is that bundles cannot save audiosnap edits. Its generally preferable to use per project audio since loading projects is much faster than bundles. To pare down the size you can just save to a new folder and choose to copy audio - this has the same effect as bundles since it will only copy used data.

i have tried safe mode, but when it opens the project up in safe mode, there is nothing there.  absolutely nothing. maybe there was an audiosnap edit in there that corrupted the bundle.  
 
that would be so cool if there was a utility that could open up everything inside a .cwb file EXCEPT the audiosnap edit that might be in there, or whatever else is the corrupting data.  
 
i have 2 projects from 2008 that i would LOVE to be able to open up and work on again, but cannot.  
 
as i said before, i haven't saved a project as a bundle since 2009 once i found out some of my bundles were corrupted, and i only use per project audio now.

Bristol_Jonesey

Elffin
Should I bounce any tracks that have ussd audiosnap before bundling the file?

Yes!
 
You should ALWAYS bounce any material that AS has been used on

thanks!

is there an underlying compression format (ZIP? CAB?), so a user could change the file extension and manually try to recover any resources therein, without using sonar to open it?

pwalpwal
is there an underlying compression format (ZIP? CAB?), so a user could change the file extension and manually try to recover any resources therein, without using sonar to open it?

does anybody know the answer to this? i have tried changing the file extension to .zip but that did not work.  would love to get inside a couple corrupted .cwb files & salvage them

Cwb files are riff files with multiple wave chunks. New versions of SONAR automatically use Wave-64 format if the cwb exceeds 2GB. To load them directly change the extension to wav or w64 depending on the size.