I'm mixing a song based around an acoustic guitar which has a lot of freetime movement. Sonar and Melodyne's new tempo detection had me really excited but it's not correctly identifying the tempo.
 
Here is an example bundle file in dropbox. You can clearly hear the opening bar has a ritard - but Sonar believes there is an extra beat. https://www.dropbox.com/s/2jjxllgfq96ra42/MelodyneTest.cwb?dl=0 
 
What is the best way to sync the tempo? 
 
Any help would be much appreciated. The complete song has a very ambitious arrangement with many different instruments making it very difficult to get right. It was written by my mentor who has a very technical classical background and a tendency to really stretch himself. Challenging, but ultimately very rewarding.
 
~ Tony

What I found helps is that I manually set the tempo as close as possible for the count in measures as what the first couple of measures are actually.... that way when the songs starts up, there isn't a huge adjustment needed by Melodyne.  This worked out well for me, give it a try.
 
Jim

For something this rubato, I recommend doing it manually with Set Measure/Beat at Now. PM me your e-mail address, and I'll send you a sample project (or .MID file with just the tempos). Took a few minutes to do the first 14 measures. 13 and 14, are especially tough because the chords are 'rolled' - almost arpeggios - with hits only at half-notes where the pattern was 8th notes before. I doubt any tempo detection algorithm would do a good job with this.