Sonar features I have never used, and what am I missing ?

razor

bitflipper
Good place to start is Craig Anderton's SONAR tips collection. Tips, by nature, tend to point out non-obvious or underused features.

Hey Bit Flipper--
 
Do you think the Sonar tips are really userful? I've been using Cakewalk for decades, but I know there any many features I don't take advantage of. Would you prefer this book over Scott Reams Sonar books?

That Tips book has so many real life examples in it, where Scotts books (are great I may add) mostly rely on the features themselves. What im trying to say is, if you want documentation scotts books are great, when you want over 100 examples of real life situations using Sonar, The tips book is what you want.
 
I have read both and honestly, its hard to compare them. they are so different yet both are excellent reads.
Survival manuals if you will. The tips book has challenged me to work outside the box and learn some new things. Things I never realized existed in sonar.

The Midi FX are pretty cool, I find the Chord Analyzer a bit sluggish at times in playing from the transport, but fine in real time 
 
The midi Echo is really flexible and allows this to note offset the each delay and choose chromatic or diatonic scales, you can swing them too. nice for creating runs. If you set the number of echoes to 3 and the delay to zero in milliseconds, the notes occur at once, creating a 4 note block chord from one note.
 
If you then add the Chord analyzer after the Echo, it will show you the notes created, the chords it has made. 
 
Transpose is pretty cool too, you can run you midi performance through it and see how it sounds in different keys or in different modes. Change you melody and chords from C Ionian to C Dorian for example.
 
Put in sequence, of Echo>Transpose>Analyzer will allow you to create block chords from one note, then fix it to a key, changing voice shapes as a result, then see what these chords are as a result. Seeing what interesting chord progression you make by accident. Playing into this is pretty fun (I use a windcontroller which is monophonic player only, so I can get pretty expressive chords from one note). After you have something, you can see what make minor changes to this the midi FX chain and stumble across interesting progressions, Open the voicing by playing with the pitch offset in Echo, adding more note extensions, changing the keys and modes in Transpose.
 
I've not used to Arpegiator that much, it's pretty cool though and nicely laid out. Add this to the end of the MIDi FX chain and from one notes on you keyboard you are creating interesting arpegiated patterns of interesting chords voicings and progression.
 
The midi event filter can help out too, when you get into difficulties. My windcontroller send pitchbend very easily, and when playing keys, it sounds wrong to modulate the pitch. Most time I can turn pitch modulation off in the synth and continue sending pitch bend, but when I can't, this comes to the recue.
 
I don't use the quantize, but someone recently asked about how to make straight drum hits sound more natural. I think this would be another good tool for that.  
 
It' a shame it's not been added too. A chord device, where instead of haphazardly like above, I can define the notes that will result when I play one note from the keyboard. And a midi voice splitter to allow notes to be output to different midi channels. Through ranges or intelligently assigning notes from a chord to different midi channels, based on their order. So bottom notes go to 1, the next note up to 2, and the next to 3, and so on. So a four note chord could be assigned to cello, Viola, Violins one and two, or baritone, Trombone, alto and trumpt 

dcmg
After pitchy singers, acoustic guitarists with dicey timing is my most laborious and frequent editing scenario. I intend to keep plugging away at Audio Snap in the hopes that it becomes a time-saving tool in that scenario. As always, the real-world tips and shortcuts are mucho helpful :)

I believe you said you bought "The Big Book of SONAR Tips." In the AudioSnap chapter, check out the tip on page 243, which relates specifically to fixing dicey rhythm guitar parts.
 
An important point about AudioSnap is it's not enough just to have markers at every transient. You also need to disable markers that occur within a single continuous block of sound, like a chord, so you don't stretch half a chord but not the other half.
 
Try the tip a few times, and AS will become second-nature for fixing guitar parts.