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Possible to convert a .cwp into human-readable format?


User Zero

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Wondering if there's a tool or process available - perhaps something used by the Devs - to parse and examine the data in a Cakewalk project file.

I have a some old .cwp project files I'd like to rework, but unfortunately I no longer have the sample synth / library that was used (Kontakt 3 & 4).  These load fine, but give the expected errors regarding missing synths.

I'd like to rebuild the project and can certainly do that using a 'best guess' as to what each synth in the Synth Rack probably had, based on the routing information in the MIDI tracks.

However, if there's any way to examine the portion of the .cwp data that defines the synth instances, that would be a huge help.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

TIA!

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I've also had some luck sometimes (depends on the plug-in) of opening a cwp in Notepad or similar (Notepad++ probably better given Notepad's propensity to sit there for hours opening a large file :-)) reading out pathnames of programs or samples from the text.

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17 hours ago, tparker24 said:

Thanks! This is a very cool little app. Sadly, it provides the same information I can see by opening the file in CW. That is, there is nothing listed about which sampling synths were used or what sample patches were loaded.

That's probably beyond the scope of the program, since it would likely require detailed specs on every known synth and how their configuration data is stored.

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On 4/8/2021 at 7:58 PM, Noel Borthwick said:

Out of curiosity what are the fields you would like to see if there were a text dump?

Hi Noel,

I was thinking it'd be nice to know which specific patches were loaded into the VSTi, how their internal levels were set, etc.

Having thought about it further, however, although I'm not familiar with the details, I imagine every plug-in has its own proprietary data structure that the DAW probably doesn't "understand", and just stores as a "blob'" for each instance.

I did try modifying the cwp file with a hex editor in an effort to get CW to load the latest version of Kontakt, but all the methods I tried ended up with an unreadable file. So I'm guessing there's a checksum or other mechanism that's getting messed up by that effort.

I eventually just exported the MIDI, routed the tracks through EWQLSO and without much tweaking at all ended up with a render that I can at least work from. Probably took less time than all the futzing around I did trying to get my old copies of K3 & K4 installed (turns out they're not compatible w/Win10 ;-).

cheers,

r

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Knowing patches is not possible because that is managed by the plugins preset management directly. Cbb doesnt know what patch is selected.
Im not surprised that you corrupted the file haha. The data structures are quite complex and there are sizes stored for chunks so if you are not careful you can corrupt the data very easily. I had some rudimentary XML extraction built in a long time ago that could output a file that had the basic track properties but you wouldn't be able to get patch names. We can consider having some basic text extraction for the project for documenting whats in the project without having to open it.

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To be more specific, my wish list for this would be-

  -The contents of the Project Notes/File Stats

  -A list of the Tracks by number and name

  - And the contents of the notepads in both the Folders and the take lanes.

 

If it were in the form of a spreadsheet that could be opened (edited?) in Excel that would be very cool.

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Some synths do expose their "preset" names as text in a cwp file, or paths to samples.  I've just checked a handful I have:

Cakewalk Dimensions (LE) - doesn't expose the prog name, but does expose the VST preset name if you've selected one or saved it as one

Korg Wavestation exposes the internal preset selected as text

fxPansion BFD 2 exposes kit piece names (and most of the parameters) as an XML chunk inside the cwp file, and the internal preset name too if you've loaded one - most usefully (it's saved my bacon at least once!), it shows the full path to any loaded groove

The format of all of these is different, but with a bit of detective work, you may be able to extract some useful information from a corrupt/otherwise unusable project.

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