What is the best way to back up in CAKE 9?

J

jant

New member
I have 6 months of work on my hard drive and want to secure my work. What is the best way to back up in Cakewalk 9? My projects are currently saved as .wrk files and I've read about people having trouble with .bun files. How Does .bun files save your audio? My concern is that I am still working on some of the tracks and I want to know if the tracks will still be separated if I re-open them as .bun files. Any info is greatly appreciated. James
 
I don't know about .bun files but if you take the folder that you songs are in and also the .wav data folder and burn a data CD everything comes over exactly how you had it. I had burnt my files to CD in that manner to bring my songs over to my new computer and everything worked great. But maybe the .bun files are a better way to do this, I don't know, like I said I never used them before. So I'll let someone who knows that stuff take over.....;)

-tkr
 
Bun files are the best way to go. The audio and the MIDI are all packaged together, very easy to deal with.
 
First things first, 6 months of non-backed up work is a disaster waiting to happen. What you should do is open your .wrk files one at a time and save them as individual .bun files, and burn the .bun files to CDR or tape or zip or jazz or whatever. You can also as an added precaution backup your wave data folder. Remember that .wrk files DO NOT contain audio. A .wrk file without the .wav files that go with it is useless. Some people, whenever they begin a new project, change their wave files directory so that they don't have all of their .wav files for all of their projects mixed together. They then backup the .wrk file and the individual wave directories for each project. I prefer .bun files.
 
burning buns . . .

Is the way to go. Gotta be careful though cause those suckers could be four times as big the original wrk. file.
My buns average in size from 100meg to 200meg, allowing for maybe 3-4 on a cd. I would recommend making a few trial cd's before vesting full trust in burning buns. This way you will become familiar with proper settings for cd software and see if your system has enough juice left for file swapping and actual burning. Anywho, now - once I convert my work to bun, I will then go and delete the wrk. file from the harddrive, seems to have worked well for me so far.
 
Gotta be careful though cause those suckers could be four times as big the original wrk. file.
Click to expand...

Four times... or ten times... or hundreds of times... even thousands of times bigger. The size of the work file has no relation to the size of the corresponding bun file. It purely depends on how much digital audio your project has, and what resolution and sampling rate it is recorded in. The MIDI part and the Cakewalk overhead in minute by comparison.

Digital audio takes up 5.3 MB/minute at 16/44.1; 5.8 MB/minute at 16/48; 8.6 MB/minute at 24/48; and 17.3 MB/minute for 24/96.
 
Per track. Stereo track, times 'em by two...

It's easy to figure out. Number of bytes per minute is

number of bits times sampling rate samples/sec times 60 sec/min divided by 8 bits/byte

so if you're doing 20 bits at 88.2 kHz you can figure it out from that formula.

Actually there is doubtless a few extra bytes worth of overhead on the files -- some sort of file header, plus you can embed those ACID markers in them and such and i don't know what all else... but that part is negligible compared to the raw audio data.
 
Ditto with everyone, save to .BUN then write it to a CDR.

My .BUN files - audio only, 6-18 tracks of 24 bit, 44.1 audio, average size 250 - 450 megs each. So 1-3 songs per CDR.
 
Thanks for all of your replies. I converted my .wrk files to .bun and burned them to cdr. All is safe and I thank you for your advice. James
 
Thanks AlChuck,

My post is based on what I've seen and done - thru my own experience. Currently all my tracks are recorded @ 24/44 in mono. I see now where all these other variables come into play, and did not consider these factors till you brought them to my attention. No matter which method any of us uses for recording the resulting wav is usually 16/44. If I were to record 10 tracks of stereo @ 96k- 4minutes in length - I'd be lucky to fit the .bun on a cd, however the final wav file (16/44) would be almost identical in size - give or take - to the same 10 stereo tracks recorded at any other bit/sample rate, I think . . .correct me If I'm wrong. Wouldn't it then make sense to record a track @96K & convert it to 44 ASAP, if not sooner ?
 
I'm a bit unclear about what you're asking. When you say, "no matter which method any of us uses for recording the resulting wav is usually 16/44," you are talking about the final mixed-down stereo track that you would play on an audio CD player, right?

If yes, then yeah, your final mix will be 16/44 in stereo, so the size will be identical no matter what went before in the song's history up to this point. But the qualitywill probably differ.

To your question is "wouldn't it then make sense to record a track @96K & convert it to 44 ASAP, if not sooner?", I would answer no - probably not. If that were true then why record at 24/96 at all? The thing with 24 bit files is that there is much more detail and the results of processing -- all the plug-ins for reverb, compression, as well as fades and mixing tracks together and whatever -- can work more accurately with better resolution of the source data. The round-off errors of calculations are smaller.

Think about somebody at the bank calculating your interest on your savings account (as if any musician or home recording enthusiast has any savings -- what a bad analogy I picked here!). You wouldn't want them to immediately start rounding off all the extra decimal points from the first calculation before they go on to the next one. Those round-off errors accumulate as you perform more calculations.
 
there's a limit.........

I just saved to cdr a 7 mins 30sec project.....I attempted to bun the thing but it was too big. The track count was large with each drum sound given a single track. Yes the bun was smaller than the individual track wavs. but once you pass 700 mb the point is moot. It took up two cdrs. Made me miss the days of taking a tape and putting it in a box...done

jant, be aware that the .bun option will turn your audio into one long wav rather than seperate tracks. Individual track editing will necessitate using an audio editor....sound forge perhaps.

I made two "identical" acoustic guitar wavs in 16/44 and 96k and sadly my tired ears could'nt hear the difference! except to make me wonder about the quallity of my microphone and wish I had one of those macs that don't make any noise.
 
bun files turn audio into one long .wav? Well, in that case I think I'll just stick with burning the .wrk and .wav data to CD. ;)
 
yes. but when you open the bun file and you will see the tracks as laid out. When you look in the CWAF tool there will only be 1 huge file. I like the bun option because at least the audio is in the proper place when you open the file. it can be a real pain to drag and drop the wav file in exactly the right place unless you have some sort of marking system which the bun file handily provides.
 
All the audio files were in it's proper place when I burnt the wrk and wav data folder to CD. Kennedy connor, what are you reffering too that you had to drag and drop the wav file?
 
well.........I had some tom parts that were recorded in pieces.....one at bar 33,77, etc. when i saved them to a sound forge file (this makes them in a language I can understand rather than the mysterious cakewalk system) there were many little wav files for each hit......I was unable to create clips of each track......well if i try to insert ("drag and drop") them into the wrk file i will need to know exactly where they will go. Hope that makes sense............

I am assuming that you save each project to an seperate .wav folder. I tried this in the past and drove myself crazy looking for files. Any tips or methods on how to do this.
thanks
 
Then it wasn't that Cake Walk was playing it's own files out of time, it was that you were inserting wav files that you had previously saved as Sound Forge files in to Cake Walk, correct? So if I understand it correclty, what you were talking about was saving it as a bun file in SF then transferring it to CW so that everything would be in time without having to paste in each wav file, right?

Since I'm saving all my stuff as cakewalk files and then opening it back up in cakewalk, I just save all my projects in one wav folder and then burn that folder to CD along with the wrk files of my projects and it works great.

-tkr
 
Tekker,

Does this mean that you never really have an
accumalation of wave files on the hard drive that
you are using for audio? Meaning you are deleting
the files from the hard drive after each project? This
seems like a good idea. Im having a problem now
trying to move my wavedata folder to another drive
due to the fact that it is so large.

Do you know of a way to do this? I want to move
it to the system hard drive so that I can install
another hard drive which will become the audio
only HD. The one that Im using currently for audio
will become the system HD and my system HD along
with the transferred wavedata folder will be moved
to my backup computer. Is that making sense?
 
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