I see, from your description, that you you’ve not set up a correctly formatted project folder. There are two ways to do this. Either from within Cubase, by designating a Project Folder, when you create the project. I suggested that you set up a dummy project, just to get a properly format folder for the “fixed” project files. If you set up the folder structure in Finder (as you appear to have done), you need to add the Audio folder yourself.
Note, however, that saving the “fixed” project to the new project folder does not designate it as the Project Folder. The new Project file still refers to the audio files in the old Project Folder (the messy one). This is why you need restore the names, in the Finder, after you’ve copied them to the Audio folder in the new project folder, in order to beak the “links” to the old Project Folder. When Cubase tells you to re-link the connections (in the “Missing Files”) dialog, the links will change to the new project folder and it will be designated as the Project Folder" for this project.
This means that any new recordings will end up in this Audio folder. If you omit this step the new recordings will end up in the old (messy) Audio folder.
By the way, I’ve figured out a faster way then renaming all the files.
- Open the Pool and see which files are used in the project.
- Copy these files to the new project folder. Note that files may belong to the project you want to fix and still be denoted as unused. For example it you’ve recorded several takes of, say the bass, and removed all but one from the Project window. It may therefore be a good idea to listen to any unused files that look as they belong to the project being fixed and copy those you want to keep aswell.
- Copy the old Project file to the new project folder.
- Drag the Audio folder, from the old Project folder, to the Desktop. This will also “break” the links.
- Open the Project file in the new project folder.
- When you get the missing link dialog click “Folder” and navigate to the Audio Folder in the new project folder. Cubase will now relink to all the used files that are found. If the missing files dialog returns, you may have missed copying one or more file(s). If this happens you can either copy the missing files (you may need to repeat step 6) or, if you don’t want to keep them, click “Close” and then go to the Pool and delete them there.
- Save the new project. You now have a “fixed” project.
Move the old “Audio” folder back to the original folder, and repeat the procedure for any other project you want to “fix”.