# Cleaning up a Session

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Cleanup looks for audio files that were recorded by ardour for this session, but are no longer in use. "In use" means "present in any playlist in any snapshot of the session". If you have unused playlists (e.g. alternate takes) cleanup will volunteer to delete them for you. then it will search all snapshots (including the one you are working with), and move all unused captured audio files into the "dead_sounds" directory within the session. At this point, you could still potentially get material that was "cleaned up" back, though its quite tricky to do.

It is advisable, even firmly recommended that after this cleanup step, you save the session, exit ardour and restart. This will enable you to confirm that the session still works as expected. If all goes well (and it should), you can then do the 2nd phase cleanup, which will remove the files from the `dead_sounds` directory (at which point, the material is not recoverable without backups on your part).

Note that the presence of snapshots can cause user confusion, as in "why didn’t cleanup do anything?" The answer is frequently that there are all capture audio files are in use in this snapshot or in others.