AudioSnap and bundle file format - Which tracks?

[icu81b4]

I'm trying to free up space on my drives by saving my old projects as 'bundles' and whizzing them over to my archive, however some of them won't convert due to me having tracks with AudioSnap markers, and I therefore need to 'bounce' those tracks before doing so but my projects have loads of tracks,

My question is this:-  How do I easily find out which tracks have 'AudioSnap' markers and need to be 'bounced' ? 

Cheers

Al. 

[Jonathan Sasor]

You can open the AudioSnap Palette for any given clip to see if it is enabled or not. As for the larger scope of your problem though, doing a save as and choosing "copy audio with project" is probably a better workflow option than saving it as a bundle. You can always zip the new project folder if you need it compressed. 

[scook]

"Save As" is the more reliable solution for project archiving. Bundles are fine for sharing projects but should not be used for archiving projects.

[icu81b4]

14 hours ago, scook said:

"Save As" is the more reliable solution for project archiving. Bundles are fine for sharing projects but should not be used for archiving projects.

Hi Scook,

Because? 

Extract from Cakewalk documentation ... 

https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=Cakewalk&language=3&help=FileManagement.3.html#1117028

Bundle files are useful for backing up projects and for burning onto removable media, like a blank CD or DVD.

I always us 'Save as' as a matter of course after making major changes to projects and increment the version number of the project, This however can lead to multiple (>10 or 20)  versions of projects all held in the same folder,  and once the song is completed I only really need to keep the last version of the project. Hence why I prefer converting that to a bundle rather than zipping up the entire folder.  

But I'm always willing to be educated otherwise  

Cheers

Al. 

 

[icu81b4]

14 hours ago, Jon Sasor said:

You can open the AudioSnap Palette for any given clip to see if it is enabled or not. As for the larger scope of your problem though, doing a save as and choosing "copy audio with project" is probably a better workflow option than saving it as a bundle. You can always zip the new project folder if you need it compressed. 

Thanks, yes ... I can work my way down the tracks and the Palette shows if it's enabled ... very useful, some of these projects are years old and I can't recall which needed Audiosnap. 

Cheers Al. 

[icu81b4]

6 minutes ago, pwalpwal said:

if a bundle becomes corrupted, you're done because it's a single file, but if you use the "save as" then you have multiple files (project and audio wavs) to work with - if one becomes corrupted then at least you still have the rest of them

(i suspect that documentation is old)

/hth

Yeh that's true ... But then again so can a zip file! 

 

[scook]

So don't use zip either. That said, I do not recall a single post about a zipped project not being able to be unpacked. The same cannot be said for bundles. I you don't mind the risk of unrecoverable errors, bundles are fine. When creating a project using "Save As" there is no need to save the project in the same folder.  "Save As" can produce a folder containing just the data referenced in the current project.

[icu81b4]

3 hours ago, scook said:

 I do not recall a single post about a zipped project not being able to be unpacked.

I wish I could say the same, regarding zip files  but I'll take heed of your experience in this matter wrt bundles, thanks for the replies. 

[scook]

The recommendation came from BandLab QA. I just echoed his sentiments.

I am not saying zips cannot get corrupted. Any file can get corrupted. But I do not recall a thread on the old Cakewalk forum regarding zipped projects being corrupted. I doubt many bother to zip projects though. Wav files don't compress much so, if I were to use zip I would probably turn off compression.

My guess is the incidence of corruption with bundles is pretty low too but when it happens the project is, for the most part, unrecoverable.

Bundles are convenient and will likely always be part of the program, if only for backward compatibility. The fact that bundling cannot store audiosnap data was used to repair projects that were blown out by an audiosnap bug (I believe this bug has been fixed).

 

With all that, packaging the files that make up a project is just one more thing to go wrong. For long term storage, the best solution is rendering all tracks to wavs. Having a project fully rendered removes the need for a specific DAW and any of the plug-ins used in the project. The wav format will likely be around a very long time.