Linked MIDI clip bug!!!

Good info Craig.  I tried a simple stretch/bounce to clip(s) to get a fixed size MIDI clip, but I didn't try it as a Groove Clip.  Much simpler - I knew somebody would have a better answer.
 
 

I think the behavior described in the original post is a bug, because if you move the notes by Nudge (hit Num2 or Num8) or Transpose (Process -> Transpose), the notes in the linked clips only move vertically. 

What make a Groove-Clip special above a standard clip and why are there two?  Cant I have it create Groove-Clips by default or do I have to Ctrl-L EVERY time!!!!

icontakt
I think the behavior described in the original post is a bug, because if you move the notes by Nudge (hit Num2 or Num8) or Transpose (Process -> Transpose), the notes in the linked clips only move vertically. 

I don't understand. Shouldn't moving up, moving down, or transposing ONLY move notes vertically? Under what conditions would transpose, or move up or down, move notes horizontally? 
 
Transpose, Nudge 2, and Nudge 8 work here as I expect them to work, so I'll need steps to reproduce in order to pursue this any further.

I think Craig gave two excellent descriptions of how MIDI is used in Sonar. I look at a MIDI clip as a one off sort of thing. It is a discrete and independent container of MIDI data. It can be a single bar or an entire track. Where a MIDI groove clip is meant to be looped. That is repeated many times. The two are very useful for different reasons. I think Craig made this clearer than I have seen anywhere else. 

icontakt
I'm only a user and see everything from a user perspective. I think any user (especially new users) would find that behavior unexpected, because what the three methods (dragging, nudging and Transpose) are doing is basically the same: select notes and move them up/down. Even if it's not a bug, I would change the behavior if I were a developer wanting to make its daw as user-friendly as possible.

 
Although I agree in principle, this issue occurs only when linking clips and if the clip doesn't have a defined beginning; the reason for that is so that advanced users aren't hamstrung. A selling point of Ableton Live is that they've restricted MIDI to the most often-needed operations to suit the musical genre for which Live was designed. I don't look down on that at all - on the contrary, I've always admired the way Ableton has remained totally true to their particular vision and design philosophy.
 
OTOH SONAR is intended to be a full-function DAW that can handle just about anything you can throw at it. As a result that means complexity, options, and a learning curve. In fact, while checking this out I found there's yet another solution that causes transposition etc. to behave exactly as you and the OP want, and it's by specifying where the clip is supposed to start in the paste dialog rather than with the clip itself. For example...
 

 
In this case, the first note doesn't start on a measure boundary but starts at 1:02:038, and the clip doesn't end at a measure boundary but ends at 1:04:058. So, in the Paste Special dialog, we want linked clips to start at 2:02:038 (remember you do not want to past a link into the original clip!), and align them to measures. So now the linked clips start at 2:02:038, 3:02:038, 4:02:038 etc. Because SONAR now knows where the clips are supposed to begin, when you transpose all the notes transpose properly, and maintain their correct relationship to the grid.
 
I agree this is pretty deep stuff, and it's understandable people will not read the help but just want things to work the way they expect them to work. But, SONAR will only learn how you work if you tell it how you work. Maybe someday analytics will solve that, but meanwhile, one needs to learn how SONAR works, and tell it what it needs to know.
 
Remember I'm a user too; I don't know code. But, the way SONAR works seems logical to me...if it doesn't know where a clip starts, it can't act appropriately. That's why when this thread surfaced, my first reaction was "you need to tell SONAR where the clip starts." I always just used Groove Clips, but in the process of answering, discovered two alternate options.
 
I'm sure there are ways to simplify Paste Special and linking, but I think the real culprit is that the documentation needs to explain the many ways SONAR can accomplish functions in a more transparent way, and be very specific in terms of illustrating what option you would choose to accomplish a particular task. For example, I don't think there's anything in the documentation that explains how to handle Paste Special with linked clips if the clip's physical beginning is not the same as the user's desired beginning.

Anderton
 
I'll try again in more detail. SONAR assumes a MIDI clip begins with the first MIDI event - note, controller, whatever. You want SONAR to assume the beginning of the clip is where you want it to be, but SONAR has no idea where that is (a quarter note, a measure, or whatever before the first event). It can't read your mind, and there's no data to give it a clue as to what you want.

 
Thanks for all the helpful information ...
 
I STILL think that pulling on the left and right edge of the clip (with the blue handle that appears) should be enough to tell SONAR where the MIDI clip starts and ends.  What is the point of that "container" you create by dragging it bigger and smaller?

RedSkyRoad 
Thanks for the great vids.  How did you create them?

 
It's LICEcap. Very easy to use.

RedSkyRoad
I STILL think that pulling on the left and right edge of the clip (with the blue handle that appears) should be enough to tell SONAR where the MIDI clip starts and ends.

 
I agree that would be the most convenient/logical behavior, but for whatever reason the design decision was made years and years ago that a clip starts with an event. I suspect the issue with changing the range may also be like a dialog box, where you can enter a value but it doesn't become "fixed" until you click "ok"...except there's no "ok" when you change the clip range. So probably the best you could hope for (without having to mess with a very fundamental part of the program) would be that when you changed the clip boundaries beyond the beginning and/or end, a dialog box would pop up that said "Redefine clip range based on current selection?" and you'd click "ok." For now, if you don't want to use one of the other three methods for overriding how SONAR defines a MIDI clip, you can consider typing Ctrl+L as equivalent to that dialog box appearing, and then clicking "ok."
 
It may get down to semantics but the reason I don't think this is a bug is because a bug is not the same as an awkward design decision. As I showed in previous posts, SONAR lets you override how it defines a clip range in three ways: dragging in the timeline, creating a Groove Clip, or entering the correct start point for the clip (instead of the default) in the Paste Special dialog. If you do any of these, Paste Special works as expected, whether transposing, undoing, whatever.
 
Therefore, I think if you want additional ways to override how SONAR defines a clip, this would need to be a feature request and not a bug report. I can think of two ways of phrasing the feature request: 
 
1. With Paste Special, "Starting at Time" should default to the start of the first event in the selection (i.e., what I did in the post where I changed the starting at time to 2:02:038 and everything worked as expected).
2. In Track View, dragging clip handles automatically overrides whatever SONAR had defined as the clip start and end. If that's not possible, then dragging clip handles brings up a dialog box that says "Redefine clip range based on current selection?"

PS: How do I know whether a MIDI clip is a groove clip or not?  Is there any indication?

Anderton
I agree that would be the most convenient/logical behavior, but for whatever reason the design decision was made years and years ago that a clip starts with an event.

Hm.... works correctly in X2 for me, I could not reproduce using the same sequence as in Platinum early this day.
Can someone check and confirm that that is a regression?