Gregkonji
I tried this method after creating the melodyne region fx. With the Percussion Algorithm it resets the tempo to 120. With the Universal Algorithm the timing is somewhat ok the first 30 measures but the rest of the song is off by a full beat.

I see this a lot too. What I end up doing is making the Region FX, then edit the tempo map in Melodyne until correct, then drag it up to timeline.

There's some really good YouTube videos on tempo mapping in Melodyne ... And not the Melodyne videos. I wish I had saved the link. But a YouTube search should find it for you. It goes through the process in detail which is dragging around beat lines and measure lines using the various Melodyne tools that appear depending on where the cursor is on the tempo map. It can be a little tedious with rubato pieces, but it works well when you're finally done.

By the way, suddenly being off by a whole beat is a perfectly typical manifestation of Melodyne getting confused at that point. And it's easily fixed within Melodyne. That and other manifestations are explained in the video. Drat! I will have to find it and I'll post it.

Well that was easy ... The second one down in Google Search. This guy has a few videos on this and I found them to explain it in practice better than Melodyne's videos.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oCvJOo7LLFw

Nice. Thanks for the links.

I just watched the advanced editing video performed by the same guy as the link you shared. It looks to be as tedious as using Sonar's audio snap manually correcting per measure. All the Melodyne marketing I've seen makes it seems like some amazing artificial intelligence machine that would save me a bunch of time.

Gregkonji
I just watched the advanced editing video performed by the same guy as the link you shared. It looks to be as tedious as using Sonar's audio snap manually correcting per measure. All the Melodyne marketing I've seen makes it seems like some amazing artificial intelligence machine that would save me a bunch of time.

Yes, it can be tedious, depending on content "quality" and how much the tempo wanders. By "quality" I mean how well Melodye can interpret the audio. Some audio files seem to be easier for Melodyne than others. So, if you have several tracks, choose the one that Melodyne works best with. Or, sometimes, using all works better since Melodyne has more information to get clues from. I think you said you had Essential? You won't have multitrack capability there, but if you upgrade you will. Unfortunately it's usually a bit expensive to upgrade unless you happen to catch a deal.

Also, you don't have to adjust every transient. I typically align measure lines, and the Melodyne algorithm adjusts beats within the measure automatically. My workflow usually involves adjusting the first beat of each measure, working left to right (increasing time) with the "coarse tool" and then take a second pass with the "fine" tool.

By the way, it may help your understanding better if you think of the two tools a little differently than the video describes them. The "coarse tool" (the top of the tempo curve) will adjust beat lines in a "free" fashion which typically results in overall changes in average tempo. It seems to affect the alignment of beat lines in adjacent measures slightly. The "fine tool" (bottom of tempo curve) can be thought of as an "maintain average tempo" adjustment tool. In other words, when you drag a beat line, you'll notice that the tempo curve will decrease on one side, and increase on the other, causing no average tempo change, just a localized one. This is useful for the second pass in my workflow since previously fine tuned measures (to the left) will not be affected by the measure you're working on.

This saves a little time over AudioSnap because in the first pass, contents within a measure will be adjusted as well. In AudioSnap, you'd have to select the transients within the measure and drag them all such that the first downbeat is on a measure line, but now the rest of the transients will be dragged linearly and they will be off. The other way is to adjust each transient in AudioSnap, and that is REALLY tedious. Melodyne will do the within-measure transients automatically.

I'm not sure how much of this Melodyne Essential will allow doing, but hopefully some of this has helped.

Good Luck!

I have had success with dragging a free guitar track to get the tempo map then locking midi drums to it. I have had less success dragging elements from an already done mix so therefore am only using it to get songs started better than the way we had.
 
I attribute this to my lack of understanding and not the limits of the technology just now.

Thanks peteL for the additional info. I do have the full blown version of Melodyne 4. I upgraded from Studio for the multi track option. I just need to learn the tool and better understand its limitations.

So I've learned how to alter and correct Melodyne's tempo map so it matches the recorded music.  With my drum track, I've edited Melodyne's tempo map so it's nearly perfect measure to measure.  However I'm now finding that even after applying this Melodyne's Region FX tempo map to the project, a third of the project's measures are off from the map created in Melodyne.  Note, the majority of the measures are mapped correctly so I know the mapping is working but not perfectly.  The errors are throughout the song randomly. 
 
See the image below for one of the errors.  I have the project's grid lines above the clips so they can be seen.  In the screenshot, I've positioned the "Now Time" to the beginning of a measure within Melodyne, that same "Now Time" in Sonar follows that position within Sonar's clip view.  The beginning of the Melodyne's measure doesn't lineup with Sonar's measure.  I've labeled this error in the image as "Time Error".  The next several measures match up perfectly. This screenshot was taken right after mapping melodyne's tempo to the project.       

 
 

How much is it off by?  I can't make it out in the screen capture.  Milliseconds?

PeteL
How much is it off by?  I can't make it out in the screen capture.  Milliseconds?

It's about 30 milliseconds.  Not much to really notice a timing issue but I'd rather have it closer so if I split measures I'm not cutting out the attack of the drum.  I'd also like to know if there's a reason for this. 
 
It really looks like Melodyne is correctly detecting the start of the beat/note instead of audiosnap's transient detect which looks for the signal's peak.  This will make edits cleaner.