Cakewalk deleting audio files on startup

[Mark S Ellis]

I posted a while ago on having this issue, but I have more info and thought it'd be better to consolidate everything to a new post.

I transferred a bunch of .bun files from an older version of cakewalk to a new laptop with the newest version of cakewalk. I had it spit the .wav files into a global folder. Thankfully I backed up the audio folder, because every time I start cakewalk it deletes almost all of the .wav files in my audio folder. This happens every time. I can copy all of the .wav files from my backup folder into my main audio folder, start cakewalk, and as soon as it opens almost all of my .wav files in the audio folder are gone. Any idea why this is happening? Also, I can't tell why it doesn't delete a few .wav files. Maybe I saved those projects differently originally? 

[Starship Krupa]

Not sure why this is happening, but it's best practice with Cakewalk to have per-project audio folders rather than one big global folder. I suspect that doing it this way might end your troubles with it.

[Mark S Ellis]

Thanks for your response Eric. Ok. Is there a way to change to per project audio folders after the fact?

[Starship Krupa]

3 hours ago, Mark S Ellis said:

Thanks for your response Erik. Ok. Is there a way to change to per project audio folders after the fact?

Since you're importing bundles, does Cakewalk give you the option of where to put the WAV's when it unpacks them? I've only worked with .CWB, not .BUN.

[Mark S Ellis]

Yes, it does. And I instructed it to unpack them all into one audio folder. Now that I've done that, there's some mechanism in cakewalk that deletes almost all of the audio files in my audio folder. 

I know if you open a .bun file and don't save it as a .CWB file, it will spit the audio files somewhere while the .BUN file is open, then delete them when you close it since you didn't save the bun file as a .CWB. I assume this mechanism is what's deleting all of the wav files on startup. 

[John Vere]

To create a per project folder for your audio simply use “Save As “ and check the “copy all audio with project “ box. Then browse to a different location and save. All the audio used in the project will always be in the folder from now on. Global folders should be avoided. 

[sjoens]

To retain the project and it's audio files you have to save it to the hard drive.

.BUN & .CWB files are basically the same thing, archives.

Opening one reestablishes the project "temporarily" as a .wrk or .cwp file in Cakewalk and places the audio where you selected it to.

Even though the unpacking process creates folders, the .cwp file won't exist on the hard drive until you save it.

Closing the project w/o saving will remove the audio from the hard drive as there is no project file to associate it with.

[Mark S Ellis]

4 hours ago, John Vere said:

To create a per project folder for your audio simply use “Save As “ and check the “copy all audio with project “ box. Then browse to a different location and save. All the audio used in the project will always be in the folder from now on. Global folders should be avoided. 

John, this fixed my problem! I didn't realize the 'save as' dialog had a spot to save the wav files... again. I went through all of my .cwp files, pointed at the backup folder I'd made of all of my .wav files to load the project (as I've had to do at a number of gigs now). Then 'saved as' and pointed both the project and audio files to new folders. That seems to have done the trick. Thank you SO much!

[Mark S Ellis]

4 hours ago, sjoens said:

To retain the project and it's audio files you have to save it to the hard drive.

.BUN & .CWB files are basically the same thing, archives.

Opening one reestablishes the project "temporarily" as a .wrk or .cwp file in Cakewalk and places the audio where you selected it to.

Even though the unpacking process creates folders, the .cwp file won't exist on the hard drive until you save it.

Closing the project w/o saving will remove the audio from the hard drive as there is no project file to associate it with.

That's the thing, though, I would open a .bun file, then save it as a .cwp file. Then when I re-opened cakewalk it would delete all of the .wav files in the /audio folder. Problem has been resolved by re-saving the .cwp files with audio to new folders.

[sjoens]

This also works for saving an existing project as a different one and want to keep all it's files & folders separate from the originals.

I also like to Create one file per clip.