I found out why my clippings were suddenly not working and their icon had changed from being a quarter-note to being a white file icon instead.
I had alt-clicked the name and changed it. Doing so lopped off the file extension. Perhaps a Mac operating system has the extension or filetype embedded in the file header, but on a Windows system you need to have that there. Funny that I missed seeing that the file extension .dptrackclip was missing from all the problematic ones! (I do go blind at such pressing times...)
So, now they work. Let's see if I can drag them with their routing intact.
..............
They work(!)
IF I place the clippings inside a PROJECT clipping window, which is a folder that resides inside a folder named Clippings in the project folder. Then, it adapts to the bundles and routing set up in that project.
I still do not understand how bundles work (at least their commonly spoken of feature, which is supposed to permit you to move to a different hardware setup yet still have the routing intact within your project). But this is a major breakthrough.
Clippings can reside in three locations, and it appears they behave according to the kind of clipping you've defined them as.
The Global Kind:
The Digital Performer Global clippings work for DP global settings. (Not entirely certain what all of our options are there.) So, those might be MIDI files that you want available anywhere for any project (like MIDI reset clips to place into a track). In Windows, the global clippings live in the folder at:
C:\Users\[yourusername]\AppData\Local\MOTU\Clippings
The Local Project kind - two types:
Project Clippings:
These sit inside a named folder inside a Clippings folder in your project folder. You can have several copies of a project sitting in that folder, and all of them will be able to use the clippings stored in there.
Startup Clippings:
These also live in the project folder. Here is what the manual says:
Startup clipping windows are project-specific, so you can launch documents that pertain specifically to the project in which you create them.
Startup clipping windows are useful for opening
CueMix files, Reason sessions or other documents
that are related to your Digital Performer project. (Chapter 55 page 681)
So, I was mistakenly using Global clippings when I needed to be placing them in the project folder's Clippings folder. This was no biggie - I copied and pasted my clippings (with their file extensions intact) from the AppData folder to the Project Clippings folder and they all worked instantly.
I hope that helps. I'll start a bundles thread so perhaps we can sort out the mysteries of those things.
So, so far we've discovered that this procedure works very well with several copies of a "source" project that exist sharing the same project folder using the clippings to build out their sequences' tracks, or for new sequence chunks inside the same project to build the tracks out (or both), at least if your goal is to keep the routing intact with your busses and input/output assignments. Trying to use this technique with new projects in a different project folder causes the routing to break, so you have to re-do all those. If there is a file sitting in the project folder that defines these routings in some way that bundles do not fulfill, I'd love to know what the file is so I can copy it to a new template/project folder!
Terry