jackroller

Anderton
you can't conform a tempo to something played freely except in SONAR and Studio One.

Would you expand on this a little?  That's new to me.

Check out Page 5 in the March 2016 eZine. It's darn near magical...I was going to demo it at Sweetwater, so wanted to see how far I could "push" it and still have it work. I was shocked at how well it conforms the tempo map to your playing. The Studio One implementation is similar, but it's not quite as elegant as SONAR's.
 
The only caveat is that even though you don't actually use Melodyne to make it happen, it does use the Melodyne engine so you need to set it to Percussive instead of Melodic mode.

As useful as Craigs and Noels tips are, they still sound like a workaround to me: Personally I switched from SONAR to Reaper a couple of years ago, then I switched to S1 when it was mature enough at about V2.6, the main reason was ARA. Although it was a close call to switch back to SONAR which also had ARA by that time. Now with the lifetime update I jumped the gun and I want to do my next project in SONAR again, just for the sake of it.... Although I have to admit that I thought "I got nothing to lose, AD2 and TH3 Cakewalk are worth the upgrade price alone". After trying and doing a lot of stuff in SONAR in the last couple of days I have to say that all these tempo-changing-features is the one department where SONAR has some major disadvantages compared to Reaper or S1. At least for me, YMMV. I'd like to explain in detail, maybe it helps to streamline SONARs version of doing these things. This is not meant as a rant:
 
Reaper has the easiest way of doing a tempo slow down and record/rehearsal to it. Period. The playback of the given material may be not as good as a Radius rendered file. But if you record at a slower tempo you will speed it up again afterwards. And  since speeding up is not such a problem soundwise as slowing doing, the sound quality is good enough at least for bass and electric guitar. Never tried it with anything else I have to admit. Nevertheless this playrate feature is and has always been one of its major advantages to me. 
 
Having said that the new Melodyne 4 (studio) is a HUGE step up when it comes to tempo editing. No doubt about it. Now S1 comes into play. Getting all tracks to follow the tempo map takes two steps: Make sure all audio events (=clips in SONAR) have a tempo in their right-click properties (may not always be the case) and in the track (!) inspector you have to activate "Timestretching", you may also chose another algorhythm. That can all be done with multiselect. Until this point you may do this with SONAR as well, although it is way more confusing with clip inspector, track inspector, the AudioSnap options there and its own window and how which option works where. One example: Why do I even have to bother with copying another clips tempo map to make "clip follows project" work for clips that have been imported after some tempo changes have been made? There is a global tempo map already, just use that one... Or did I completely misunderstand this?
Anyway, the real advantage of S1 is that you cannot only drop a Region-FX-clip to the time line so the melodyne tempo map will be copied (SONAR can do this too), but you have a tempo track directly in the arrangement window and you can select multiple tempo changes to drag them all up or down together. They will stay relative to each other. So as an example you have two tempos: 50 and 100. Now you select both and drag the second one (100 bpm) up to 150. Now the first tempo is 75 bpm. There is no way you can do this in SONAR, except for editing each tempo on its own. But that is no option with a melodyne tempo map that has a lot of tempo changes. The only way I found to mass edit tempo changes is "fit to time" but that is also just a workaround since the target value are bars or SMPTE, but not bpm or a playrate. Anyway, it is awesome that with Melodyne 4 you can now playback certain bars of a non-metronome-based track and use its own bar grid to create loops without having to mess with "where is the 1 in that waveform?". AND you can slow it down/play it faster that way, too . At least if you can mass edit tempo changes. It is sad that SONAR is not quiet there yet ;-)
 

Thanks for the feedback. It make take awhile before you see this but we definitely have plans for improving tempo support in SONAR including stuff like a conductor track. 
Regarding the melodyne tempo mapping support we actually have a pretty deep implementation that surpasses what the other DAW's do. Not sure if you are aware of it but we can extract tempos via simple drag and drop of audio clips to the timeline and it will also handle extracting tempos from multiple clips.
Mass editing tempos is not available yet but we'll consider it.

danam2
Reaper has the easiest way of doing a tempo slow down and record/rehearsal to it.

 
Easier than enabling Clip Follows Project and changing the tempo?
 
I really have to think SONAR is a match for anything out there in both simplicity and quality if you combine using Audiosnap for the temporary stretching to slow down the existing audio and Melodyne to compress the new audio to the original tempo. So long as the project is a single fixed tempo, I seriously cannot imagine anything simpler in terms of the number of clicks/keystrokes or time needed; the steps to make the tempo changes should take significantly less time than recording the new part.
 

...you can select multiple tempo changes to drag them all up or down together. They will stay relative to each other. So as an example you have two tempos: 50 and 100. Now you select both and drag the second one (100 bpm) up to 150. Now the first tempo is 75 bpm.

 
SONAR's definitely overdue to have this and other tempo-editing capabilities.

brundlefly

danam2
Reaper has the easiest way of doing a tempo slow down and record/rehearsal to it.

 
Easier than enabling Clip Follows Project and changing the tempo?
 
I really have to think SONAR is a match for anything out there in both simplicity and quality if you combine using Audiosnap for the temporary stretching to slow down the existing audio and Melodyne to compress the new audio to the original tempo. So long as the project is a single fixed tempo, I seriously cannot imagine anything simpler in terms of the number of clicks/keystrokes or time needed; the steps to make the tempo changes should take significantly less time than recording the new part.
 

...you can select multiple tempo changes to drag them all up or down together. They will stay relative to each other. So as an example you have two tempos: 50 and 100. Now you select both and drag the second one (100 bpm) up to 150. Now the first tempo is 75 bpm.

 
SONAR's definitely overdue to have this and other tempo-editing capabilities.

I agree. I think Sonar is a match for anything out there.
in the last 2 years with RX FX (Melodyne, drum replacer, vocal synch)
Sonar really tipped the scale. I can do anything I can in any other daw out there.
reapers tempo changing options, while they may be nice, reaper doesn't even compare to sonar.
IMO, not even a close second.

chuckebaby
I agree. I think Sonar is a match for anything out there.
in the last 2 years with RX FX (Melodyne, drum replacer, vocal synch)
Sonar really tipped the scale. I can do anything I can in any other daw out there.
reapers tempo changing options, while they may be nice, reaper doesn't even compare to sonar.
IMO, not even a close second.

Agreed. While Reaper's varispeed is pretty great (I keep it around just for that purpose) and I covet it highly for SONAR, it's other tempo features are incredibly cumbersome and worse than Audiosnap for ease of use. 

brundlefly

danam2
Reaper has the easiest way of doing a tempo slow down and record/rehearsal to it.

 
Easier than enabling Clip Follows Project and changing the tempo?

Wasn't sure if the question was rhetorical or not, but the answer is Yes.  If the default setting for Timebase has not been modified from Beats, you only have to change the tempo and you are done.
 
-- Ron

I'm very grateful too the  forum members " in the know " that are here discussing their preferences regarding this type of workflow in SONAR while comparing it to other fully feature capable DAW's .
Your passionate views and in depth sharing of workflow techniques are and have been very helpful to me  
 
A very big reason why I originally restricted "my personal comments to SONAR only " when I first started this thread includes and is based on something I have had to wrestle with for some time  .
SONAR has been growing super fast with all the new features and monthly added functionality that I'm getting left in the dust over here...lol ( Not here to argue my limitations ....  yet, it's my fault ...not anyone else s  )
This is certainly something that has forced me to take personal responsibility too do something about it ...
I went out and bought Eli's  SONAR Platinum Advanced video from Groove 3 . Having done so started a positive chain of events .
This may tie into something Craig mentioned about the loop construction workflow in SONAR ...
Eli's chapters on that topic literally propelled me from the stone age where I was before into helping my inner SONAR light bulb finally go off ...
I simply had no idea how advanced the loop view workflow in SONAR truly was . Also , I had no idea how much could be automated , nor did I comprehend how advanced and what type of time saving the functionality of the SONAR version of the loop construction environment could bring to the table .
Thankfully ,  I'm learning my way around it  
BTW, All this ties into why I started this thread in the first place .  
Once I started getting comfortable learning and working in SONAR's loop construction view  , I had the realization that I could finally create my own unique vocabulary of musical loops based on my style of guitar playing and musical ideas .
Being able to record some of my guitar audio examples at the speed they can be played at comfortably is a nice motivation for me to get busy learning what needs to be learned over here at my end too accomplish that goal .
Thank you all for your help .
 
all the best ,
 
Kenny

SquireBum

brundlefly

danam2
Reaper has the easiest way of doing a tempo slow down and record/rehearsal to it.

 
Easier than enabling Clip Follows Project and changing the tempo?

Wasn't sure if the question was rhetorical or not, but the answer is Yes.  If the default setting for Timebase has not been modified from Beats, you only have to change the tempo and you are done.
 
-- Ron

 
Thanks, Ron. I really did want to know how it could be simpler. I suppose if stretch-enabling all audio is the default, that would eliminate a step. But, just to be difficult (), that seems to contradict this post on the Cockos forum:
 
http://forum.cockos.com/showpost.php?p=324479&postcount=7
 
"Normally Reaper would never time or pitch alter audio when changing BPM. The only way this would happen is if the time base is set to "beats (position, length, rate)". The timebase can be set for each particular item (right click item properties), per track (right click track control panel), or per project (file menu project settings).

Some media (like Acidized wavs) will get imported with time base set this way, so you will need to un-set the time base per item if you don't want them to stretch."

brundlefly

SquireBum

brundlefly

danam2
Reaper has the easiest way of doing a tempo slow down and record/rehearsal to it.

 
Easier than enabling Clip Follows Project and changing the tempo?

Wasn't sure if the question was rhetorical or not, but the answer is Yes.  If the default setting for Timebase has not been modified from Beats, you only have to change the tempo and you are done.
 
-- Ron

 
Thanks, Ron. I really did want to know how it could be simpler. I suppose if stretch-enabling all audio is the default, that would eliminate a step. But, just to be difficult (), that seems to contradict this post on the Cockos forum:
 
http://forum.cockos.com/showpost.php?p=324479&postcount=7
 
"Normally Reaper would never time or pitch alter audio when changing BPM. The only way this would happen is if the time base is set to "beats (position, length, rate)". The timebase can be set for each particular item (right click item properties), per track (right click track control panel), or per project (file menu project settings).

Some media (like Acidized wavs) will get imported with time base set this way, so you will need to un-set the time base per item if you don't want them to stretch."

Dave,
  The referenced forum post was from 2009.  I just did a clean portable install of version 5.211 (latest release) to verify that I had not changed the Project defaults in my installation.  The Project Setttings dialog in the new install shows the Timebase for items/envelopes/markers set to Beats(position, length, rate).  [see attached]
 

 
-- Ron