Is this a job for Audiosnap? How would you proceed?

Greetings--
 
I have some old stereo recordings I made many years ago and I'd like to load them into Sonar and add some other instruments, especially drums. My problem is that I can't figure out how to teach Sonar where the beats are. When I let Sonar try to identify the transients, it can't really pull it off. 
 
I thought I might record a second audio track in which I would just tap the beats, but then how do I tell Sonar to use that tempo? 
 
I don't want to stretch/shrink the music to fit Sonar's tempo (like Audiosnap would adjust a sloppy performance to fit its tempo), but rather have Sonar adjust the tempo to fit what is already recorded. 
 
Oh yeah, I'm in platinum.
 
Any thoughts? Thanks!

Thanks Wicked. That gets me started.

fastbikerboy did the definitive tutorial on this.   youtube has it.

What the other guys are describing and what Karl "FastBikerBoy" shows in his vids is how to edit the tempo map of a clip which is useful for many things but if I'm reading your OP correctly you just want the project tempo to match your tunes. Editing the clip map is more of a PITA and unnecessary for your needs. I'm not at the DAW right now otherwise I'd double check and post more detailed instructions but try out what I posted AND check out the clip map editing to see what best serves your needs.

The problem I find with all this autodetect stuff is no matter what if you want it to be truly accurate you are generally going to have to go back through and correct things which even at the best of times is going to be almost as tedious and painstaking as doing it manually from the get go. If you are going to have to go through everything anyway then why not just get in there and do it one measure (or even one beat) at a time and KNOW that it's done right?
 
However the auto detect stuff works best on this type of live material when you split the tracks up into sections. That way instead of the detection algorithms having to find an overall tempo for a loooong out of whack performance which inevitably results in out of whack and erroneous assumptions it is working with smaller, easier to manage chunks. It ends up being more accurate then you can send that to the timeline section by section.
 
I still say that there is no need to go into the clip tempo map for the OP's needs and then translate it to the timeline. He just wants the project timeline to match the audio. No clip tempo editing needed. Not sure but I think from there he might be able to snag the newly created tempo map and apply it to the overall clip (so in reverse) if he wanted to screw around with it as a groove clip but I'm not sure about that.

From the Beep: If you want to use the original tempo and timing you can just right click on the timeline and select Insert Beat/Measure from the dropdown menu. A window will pop up with Sonar's best guess at what on what it should be and you can edit it from there. I did this with some live tracks from years ago and although it is tedious it's pretty easy.
 
It took a little bit of fiddling around, but in the end it worked perfectly. At first, when I would try to insert beats/measures, Sonar would come back with some really crazy tempos, up in the 300s. I went to that window that lists all the tempo adjustments line by line and found that there were a bunch of tempo markers that Sonar had left in there (maybe from my previous attempts to fudge my way through), and once I deleted all those it went like butter. 
 
This really thrilled me, really, really thrilled me. My big hesitation in getting into this computer-intensive music making is that it is easier to make everything perfect than to make things a little sloppy. This is a perfect example. I hadn't really found a way to bring in the sort of subtle tempo changes that would naturally, unconsciously happen if I was playing without a computer-generated click track. I had figured I'd have to lay down the drum track first, rigid as it is, and then everything else would have to adhere to that set tempo. But this means that I can record the tonal elements first, with whatever subtle tempo transformations I want, and then mark out that tempo and fit the percussion to it afterwards. Holy crap! Transformation!
 
From Gdugan: I'm not at my DAW right now, but I think you want "Fit Improvisation". Basically, you import your audio files into Sonar, create a midi track and record 1 note for each beat of the imported audio. Then you select the midi track and choose "Fit Improvisation" which will create the tempo map for you from the midi note timing. The more accurate you are with lining up the midi notes with the imported audio beats the more accurate the tempo map will be.
 
Thanks for that. I have a few more old tunes to experiment with. I'll give that a try.

BTW one thing I do after I set up my timeline is go into the Tempo Map view and draw in a straight line from wherever the tempo is at the start of the music to the beginning of the project. That way you don't have to screw around approximating the initial tempo. So if you open a project at the default tempo of 120 but your project ends up being around 140 when the music starts you just draw a line backwards at 140 to the start of the project (or use the insert Tempo dialog I guess). Now you have an in time count in to the song.
 
It took me a few times to get that right but it does work.