audio snap - selecting transients

EQ to exaggerate the transients, transient shaper, expander/gate can help the detection process.

Normalizing is not the answer, you need to exaggerate the peaks not raise the overall level.

You are only interested in generating a recognizable signature from each drum. Sweep a band pass filter on each track to until you get a signal that audiosnap can easily recognize.

TraceyStudios
Thanks for your help scook, I give up.  I really don't understand what to do and looks like you don't want to explain very much. So I will move on.

Thanks!   :)
 

scook was being extra-helpful in my opinion.  If you cannot understand his suggestions, that is on you to communicate or do some research. 
 
Audiosnap is dreamware.  For me it's always been buggy and never worked like the magical demo videos portrayed.  It even fails on very clean tracks with little bleed, like a kick or snare, where I can clearely hear and see drastic transients.  It adds transients in the craziest places! Messing with the threshold fixes some, but removes transients from correct spots.  It's a battle.  In the end, scook's advice is right on: you need to bandpass everything except the frequency with your target transient and crank it.  You'll still have to manually fix a bunch, but that'll get the bulk done.

Hi, Tracey. I'm pretty sure scook wasn't trying to be dismissive. He's always very helpful and, this is the important part, concise with his explanations. I understood what he meant with the bandpass thing but might not have 6 months ago. Just to be clear a bandpass EQ filter is when you you have a high pass and a low pass filter blocking out the highs and lows leaving just a spot in the middle of the EQ frequency range. That will make it so only that middle spot can be heard. The range or "band" can be made wider (adding more of the signal) or narrower (honing in on more specific frequencies). Then you can "sweep" it across the frequency to find exactly where the main part of the signal is, in your case a specific drum. For audiosnap to work it doesn't need to sound good it just needs to be loud so once you find the sweet spot try and narrow or widen the band honing in on it even more to get the signal as strong as you can while removing any other sounds surrounding it. Then boost the frequency's gain to make it even louder. Now try your bounce and enable audiosnap. It should be better.
 
I'm sorry if you already knew that stuff but you did seem to want more details. A while ago I might have thought scook was referring to the technique where you use a narrow band filter and sweep it across the freq range to isolate problem areas WITHOUT the hi and lo pass engaged (thus leaving the entire signal intact just boosting that narrow band). Maybe that's what you tried and why it didn't work.
 
Another way you could do this is with R-Mix which is basically an EQ that is just visually represented and manipulated differently. Load up R-Mix on the track and press play. Whenever the drum gets hit you should see a big blob pop up onto the screen. Get the R-Mix circle or square thingy to surround where the blob is appear and adjust the fader that turns all the signal outside of the circle/square. Turn it all the way down and you should be left with just the tom hits. Bounce and engage audiosnap.
 
You have already tried gating so I'm not sure why that's not working but maybe it's a really noisy signal or the drums are too dynamic for  the gate method.
 
As far as audiosnap and transients... well they are fickle beasts and even if you do get the track's background noise eliminated the transient detection still won't be perfect. Just set the Audiosnap Threshold to where it is showing most of what you want but leaving off the stuff you don't. Then listen back as you look at the waveform and the transients. If there is a transient marker that didn't get activated automatically click the diamond in the middle of the marker to select it, right click and select Disable (this is weird because Disabled will be checkmarked when the marker is actually enabled and vice versa so just click it until the handle lines appear on the marker which means it's enabled). Sometimes there won't even be a disabled transient marker to enable. In that case you have to insert one yourself by pressing Alt then clicking where you want the marker to be.
 
There are lots of glitches in Audiosnap as well and I'll warn you make sure you can finish whatever transient work you are doing in one session. I lost an entire afternoon's work because I saved and shut down for the night in the middle of a long audiosnap session. When I opened the project the next day it was completely corrupted and unusable. I find it to be an extremely frustrating feature to work with at times but when it does actually work it's probably the most amazing feature in Sonar. It's some crazy voodoo magic or something.
 
Anyway... don't get too frustrated and I hope you can maybe apologize to scook because he really was trying to help you even if it didn't seem like it.
 
Cheers.