Cakewalk Bun Fun?/CDRW?

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kennedy connor

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I've been being a good boy and attempting to back up my audio in the event of the inevitable hard drive/winX/blue screen/you name it/crash/disaster.......Started out saving cakewalk wrk files and then attempted to save entire wav folder to cdr....yes I'm learning the hard way...so i had this brilliant original idea of saving these "bundled" files...what a concept...then i thought what if i saved these bundled files to the CDRW disk and i would be able to keep an ongoing updated backup of projects i was currently working on.....saving lots of money and hassle of sorting through piles of poorly identified little plastic disks.....
so first I had to format these CDRW disks (25 minutes) then it took something like 35 minutes to move the file to the disk....then i spent 20 minutes loading them... some kind of disk error ...corrupted data... abandon ship....
I am using a Plextor 12/10/32 on P3/256/2HD's7200...the only cdrw disks i could find were 4X Is ther some piece of the puzzle i'm missing? Help?
 
I back up my .bun files to CDRW all the time without any problems. I have Adaptec's Direct CD installed on my computer (came with the CD Writer) which allows me to treat the CD Writer like any other drive under Windows.

Generally then all I need to do is pop a CDRW into the drive, and do a "save as" directly from my Cakewalk program - specifying to save it as a .bun file and directing the save to my CD-Writer drive. Typically I've found this only takes a minute or two and your song is backed up (but I'm sure the time will vary depending on the number of tracks involved, length of the song, and other variables).

The process I've been using is to save the song as a .wrk file on my hard drive. When I'm finished working on the file for the day, I do a final save of the .wrk file, and then perform a "save as" in .bun format to the CDRW. The next time I work on the song, I recall the .wrk file from my hard drive, and again when I'm done working for the day, do a "save as" .bun again (Cakewalk will prompt if you want to overwrite the original file). As such, I never directly open the .bun file, and only plan to do so in the case of an emergency. The other case might be where I'm done working on a song. In that case I would delete the .wrk file to free up space on my hard drive. If I ever need to go back to the song, then I would recall the .bun file from the CDRW.

Good luck.
 
Like dachay2tnr, I have no problem savin buns to CDR, which makes me ask . . . why CDRW instead of CDR. CDRW is a little fussier from my experience and with CDR's down to 50 cents a piece just toss um if you don't won't um.

Regards,
PAPicker
 
The Adaptec Direct CD Software is the BEST for backing up files/writing to cd-r/etc. It lets you use a blank cd-r as if it were a regular hard drive. Thus, instead of having to go through the whole process of writing to a cd (which takes way too much time/gives you buffer underwrite errors/etc)you simply drag and drop files to your cd-writer drive letter (usually d:, but sometimes it's something else)in Windows Explorer, or save them directly in cakewalk(usually I write all my .bun files to one folder (or as many songs as add up to 650 MBs) then just drag that folder onto the cd-writer drive letter in Windows Explorer)when you eject the disk, it asks if you want to make the disk readable in all cd-rom drives, or leave it formatted as is so you can continue to use it as if it were a regular hard drive. I urge everyone to get this software-it doesn't matter what type of cd-writer you have, it will work with any kind ( I have a ricoh, but the software that came with it is slow and horrible) Buy it, "borrow" it from a friend, whatever, just get it and see how much easier backing up and re-saving .bun files can be!!!
 
Burning Your Buns!

I have been doing exactly what dachay2tnr is doing, saving .WKR files, then doing a "save as" to .BUN (to hard disk) at the end of each session. I then burn those .BUN files to CDR. I use EZCD Creator 4 and have had no problems. With CDRs being so cheap I find it easier to use them then CDRWs.

This brings up another question though. As anyone who looks can verify, .WRK files are just tiny sets of instructions. Actual digital audio data is saved in other seperate files, using a cryptic naming convention Satan himself must have invented. If you just delete the .WRK file you wind up with huge amounts of useless files on your hard drive. So how do you delete a .WRK file and make sure all the seperate parts get deleted too?
 
So how do you delete a .WRK file and make sure all the seperate parts get deleted too?

After you save your .bun file, delete the .wrk file. Then open up Cakewalk, but do not load any song files. Go to the Tools menu and select Clean Audio Disk. From the window that pops up, click the Find button. This will find all the audio (wave) files that are not associated with any .wrk file. Once the search is completed you can click the Delete button and they'll all be gone.

It's not a bad idea to do this occasionally anyway, as Cakewalk saves audio files even for your "outtakes". In other words, if you record the same part three times, it will create files for all three takes, even when you only keep the last one. Clean Audio will get rid of those.

Of course, make sure you have saved your .bun file first, otherwise you'll be spending your next few weekends re-recording all those little 1's and 0's :)
 
To add one thing to dachay2tnr's advice . . . once you delete the .wrk file, if you're running windows and have a recycle bin, be sure to empty it of the deleted .wrk files because cakewalk will find it when you clean the audio disc and not delete the wav files.

Regards,
PAPicker
 
Still no answer to my original question. I use all the above mentioned techniques and software and yes CDR is cheap but family and friends will testify I am not the most organized person and continually morphing record of each days work would be oh so much easier for me to keep track of.

regarding those pesky audio files that won't go away..all above mentioned techniques work but somehow thru user error or whatever they often just keep hanging on....No one mentioned the CWAF tool which locates alot your "orphan" files,plays them for you and deletes too.
thanks for all your replies
 
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