How to make a Cakewalk project shorter?

[Deesnay]

Sometimes, you work on a long project (I mean the song's duration, as measured in minutes or bars), and then for some reason, the project gets shorter, say reduced from 100 bars to only 75 bars.

The trouble is: when you use Ctrl+A (Select All), this will still select 100 bars, although the last 25 are empty (or at least seem empty).

I cannot seem to find a way to completely remove these last 25 bars, or tell Cakewalk that my project actually ends at bar 75 rather than 100. Any idea?

[Lord Tim]

This means there's likely some data past the song end, like an automation node or some other event you're not seeing.

To get rid of it:

Turn on Ripple Editing, select those last 25 bars, press delete.

And make sure you turn off Ripple Editing right away before you make a horrible mess of your project!

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, it closes the gap when you remove sections (or shifts things along if you insert or move something too). In this case, there was some rogue data there between where you wanted the song to end and where Cakewalk assumed the end was, so you've essentially just closed the deleted hole between both of those places.

[57Gregy]

You can select the length by dragging on the timeline then bouncing/exporting.
Any clip that is too long you can split/delete the excess or slip edit the clip then Bounce To Clips.
There are other ways.

[Chris Boshuizen]

Often for me it is stray automation dots, usually on the volume track. Eg, if you create an envelope when the project is 100 bars long, there might be a dot at the end of the clip. When you shorten down to 75 bars, the stray may still be there. Do a quick scan of all automation lanes and delete the dots. 

I just worked on some 1 hr+ live sets and out at bar 1900 there was a bunch of stuff that caused me the same issue. 

[mettelus]

The above will get rid of the excess data. To find the offending track zoom out in Track View and one (possibly more) of the tracks will have clips all the way to bar 100.

[John Vere]

I was going to say " Just speed it up" 

[Deesnay]

21 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Turn on Ripple Editing, select those last 25 bars, press delete.

This seems to work fine, indeed! 👍🙂

I have no idea why. The original purpose of this ripple editing is to automatically remove holes when you delete parts of a track, isn't it?