Drum Replacer a HIT!

I spent most of the day working on a new song and had the opportunity to use drum replacer extensively. 
 
It's a huge improvement over past efforts in this area.
 
It still doesn't do anything to help with tightening up multitrack drums, which in my opinion was a bigger need than replacing/triggering sounds.
 
However, it is a big improvement and hopefully is the beginnings of a module to completely deal with multitrack drums. 
 
One unexpected benefit is that a track you "replace" drum sounds on also gets sort of a gated treatment. The new track, after rendering, drops any sounds in the track that were below the threshold chosen. This is very helpful and is better and more reliable than tweaking a gate FX.
 
It's also a much better way to create a midi track for triggering AD2 drum sounds for layering. Although the drop down for the "midi note" doesn't allow you to pick any midi note, but that's not too big as you can always transpose the resulting midi track to any note after you're done.
 
All in all, good work and a great start towards a much needed multitrack drum editor that is better than the competition. 
 
gabo

Agree there should be some interesting and creative ways people come up with using it. Should be fun to learn what people figure out.
 
As for multitrack drums and audiosnap. That's the way to do it, but audiosnap still has problems. Missing transients, putting them in the wrong place, and general errors with it. 
 
A threshold line, like in replacer is much better than trying to use a "percentage" slider like in audiosnap. And the filtering in replacer is a great addition.
 
In general slicing up multitrack drums and tightening them up either with other instruments or with the grid is still cumbersome in sonar. The competition has better ways of doing it than sonar does and there are indeed people on here who export the drums to other packages, edit them, and then bring them back into sonar.
 
I don't do that, as overall I think sonar is the best. But it can be improved and multitrack drum editing is one area where I think sonar is a bit weak. 
 
By the way, great work on all the FX Chains!! I use those all the time!
 
gabo

gbowling
The competition has better ways of doing it than sonar does and there are indeed people on here who export the drums to other packages, edit them, and then bring them back into sonar.

*raises hand*
I did our last album entirely in Sonar... except I did all the multitrack drums in REAPER. What took an hour per song in REAPER would have been about 5 hours in Sonar with all the manual cropping and crossfading I would have had to do.
 
I might use the Drum Replacer on the next record, but really I want better tools for aligning the hits before I worry about replacing some of them. Sure, if you replace everything, you can just quantize it... but I won't be replacing everything. And given that Drum Replacer doesn't seem to currently make any attempt to map input gain to hit velocity, I wonder how widely applicable it really is. (Edit: apparently there is some sort of dynamics control, just not visible or used in the two videos I watched.)

If you set the output to 100% wet then you won't hear the original piece, right? Was there something else you expected from this feature?

Correct, if you set it to 100% it does completely replace and if you then "render" that it creates a completely replaced and new track. 
 
Also, if you drag the track to a midi track, it will generate the midi per the hits you have defined with the threshold, filter, etc. which you can then use to trigger AD2 or anything else. Again completely replacing the original. 
 
So it is indeed a replacer, or if you want it to be (by sliding wet to something other than 100%) an enhancer, or whatever. 
 
Really a great tool and great UI, but as was pointed out, not as effective at tightening up multitrack drums as other tools. 
 
gabo

mettelus
The only issue that I have is that it is not really a "replacer" but more a "layering" application as is today. There is no way to "obliterate" an underlying kit piece and replace it with something new.

Yes there is. Set the gain to 100% wet.

Um, but obliterating the remainder of the kit is the "issue." Taking a loop with 6 pieces and walking away with 3 requires 2 passes to get all 6. I have not tried that, but seems feasible "as is."
 
@Kylotan - Depending on material, it can be done in a loop construction fashion (i.e. slicing the audio at transients and redefining the slice).