Lost audio files?

[Thomas Lehrecke]

I am a legacy Sonar Platinum user. Recently in cleaning up/organizing files on my hard drive, I must have moved the Cakewalk/Sonar audio files. Now when I call up an existing song project, midi files populate the screen, but there are no audio files, vocal, guitar etc. Any suggestions? As far as I know, I did not delete the files. The files never showed up in the recycle bin, that I can find. I cannot find the files any where. Under Cakewalk Projects/Audio, the folders are empty. Anybody have any idea?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[David Baay]

If files are missing, Cakewalk will pop up a dialog prompting you to locate them. If you don't get any warnings, then audio clips referencing those files were deleted from the project (or never existed) before it was saved. Deleting a clip does not delete the file, so those files it should still be available to re-import unless you *did* in fact whack them via Windows Explorer.

I suggest you run the Cakewalk Audio Finder utility (Utilities > CWAF Tool) and let it search your all you drives. It will show 'Missing' files that projects are referencing but were not found, 'Orphaned' files that are no longer referenced by any project, and 'Referenced' files that are used by one or more project files.

After executing 'Find', you can click on a'Referenced' or 'Missing' file to see what projects are referencing it it, or click on a project to see what files it references.

If clips were inadvertently deleted from one or more projects, the previously associated audio files should show as Orphaned.

Depending on what else you have on your PC, and how you set up CWAF, a lot of the 'Orphaned' files may be .WAV files that are unrelated to Cakewalk.

See post #5 in the below thread for a 'primer' I wrote on how I use it:

http://forum.cakewalk.com/Clean-Audio-Folder-still-broken-I-see-m3023320.aspx#3023681

Edited May 1, 2020 by David Baay

[John Vere]

Hmm, Your not using per project folders?? That became the default a long time ago. There were a lot more threads like these in those days. 

I forget how to find them now it's been a long time.. But I think it has something to do with running a search for the name of the audio file.  

" NAME OF SONG" , Rec ( 217) .wav   

The tricky thing is that number in brackets is pretty random.