Reference Guide

112 Tutorial 1 – Creating, playing, and saving projects

Saving project files

SONAR offers you many options for saving your work. To investigate these options, click on the File

menu and choose Save As. This opens the Save As dialog box. Before doing anything in this

window, the first thing you should do is select Project Files in the Go to Folder list. Even if it already

says Project Files, click it anyway.

You will notice this window looks very familiar to the Open dialog box we looked at earlier in this

tutorial. The Save As dialog box navigates files much in the same way as Windows does. If you

would like to read the finer points and in-depth information about using this window, click the Help

button. For this exercise, we are going to look at the different types of project files you can save with

SONAR.

Take a look at the drop-down list labeled Save as type. Click the Save as type arrow to see a list of

supported file formats. Let’s look at these different files formats now:

• Normal. This is the first option listed and the most common format used for saving project files.

Choosing this will create a Cakewalk Project file with the .cwp file extension. It is important to

remember that Cakewalk Project files do not

actually store any audio data, but rather reference

audio files from where they are saved on your computer’s hard drive. You can choose where the

audio files are stored by using the Audio Path field in the Save As dialog box.

• Template. Template files are used as a starting point for new projects. Templates can store layout

information about your project, such as how many audio and MIDI tracks there are and which