The only thing I had done right before this issue arose was this:
As this was clearly becoming large project I bought a 2TB RAID drive to dedicate to it. The entire project was on a smaller, more congested drive. I hooked up the RAID and moved the entire project over to it. I changed no file names and FCP was not running when I did it. I put the original Events/Project folders in a new folder so as not to confuse FCP when I relaunched it. FCP itself and all its ancillary files remained in place on my system drive.
When I opened FCP everything was fine and I even did some work on the project. It wasn't until I stepped away from it and then returned that I lost first the audio meters, then the scrubbing buttons and now--new revelation--many clips in the Events library claim to be missing. It's as tho this project is slowly, incrementally dissolving!
An odd twist: I just switched back to the original version of this project thru the various folder swaps necessary and the job, its cilps and the audio functions are back in place. Can't understand this. The Project/Events folders of the respective versions have identical contents. (except for that small bit of work I did right after the move)
At present, the audio functions have returned in full but the clips remain reported as missing. As a side note, another major ongoing project, the folders/files of which were not touched, remain fully functional in FCP.
I'm at a loss.
