Bristol_Jonesey
Yeah that would be my suggestion, I'd also drag the left hand edge of each clip out so they all start at 01:01:000
 
Don't worry about spending months on one album Beep.
We're STILL working on a crazy concept album (double CD's worth) since early 2008!

Yeah, my early work with Baps and then all the session work I've picked up the past couple years has gotten me fully up to speed on keeping things in sync across projects. Pretty easy with audio. Gets a little hairier with MIDI.
 
I'm actually now trying to wrap my head around tossing tempo maps around between projects. I've muddle together a couple methods (I hav eyet to test) that involve 1) applying the timeline to Audio files then applying that clip map to the blank project timeline (not sure if that will work) or 2) creating a "dummy" MIDI clip to toss the project timeline tempo map onto and then transferring it to the new/blank project timeline.
 
That's a work in progress and requires some testing but I won't need it for a while yet.
 
As far as draaaaaawn out projects this one was tracked in 2002 IIRC and was just a preproduction session before going into the studio. Of course the band imploded shortly afterward (as usual... friggen musicians, lulz). This was all supposed to happen under another producer (and we actually retracked everything a few years later with new members but it kind of sucked).
 
Now I'M the producer but it's had to wait until I learned enough to do it "properly". Long road but I'm a stubborn pr*ck. Pretty cool it's actually starting to come together now though after all these years.
 
Cheers.

Good stuff Beep - keep at it.
 
Just one reminder (I'm sure you know this already). If you're ONLY working with audio then tempo changes are totally irrelevant to your project, at least when it come to already tracked material. It's only when you delve into Midi-land that tempo/key/time sig rears their ugly little heads.

Duplicate

Yup. Thing is I;m correcting some CRAZY drift (very FAST hardcore) and there are some natural speed ups/slow downs that need to be accounted for too.
 
What I'm doing is going through each section of the tunes one at a time and using Slip Stretching (on grouped clips across all the tracks) to hard correct the parts that are supposed to be steady then massaging all the "speed up/slow down" parts by hand so they sound the way I want.
 
There are other issues in Sonar making this more difficult (like Grouped Clips do not obey Slip Stretching or Snap so it has to be done one track at a time for each edit and then I have to zoom WAY in to hand adjust the edits further to keep phase relations across the tracks).
 
That's the "first pass" in my correction scheme. Essentially just getting the overall material tight to a desirable tempo map.
 
Then I'll be using Audiosnap "Merge and Lock" stuff to tighten up specific hits and fills as well as comping together the best parts from both performances of each song (everything was recorded twice so I can swap out fills and vocal phrases). That's where I'm really gonna need the tempo map stuff intact.
 
The only things that REALLY matter are the drums and vox. I'll be retracking the bass and guitars myself.
 
As for MIDI I'll be doing some drum reinforcement/replacement so even though using MIDI extraction on a set audio scheme it would still be useful to have the tempo map in place for correcting any screwed up MIDI notes from the extraction.
 
After all the drums are set up and tight and the replacement guit/bass tracks are recorded I may actually then reimport the original vocal tracks to get rid of all the stretching mayhem then stretch them again in a much less intrusive way (instead of all the splits and audiosnap/stretching mayhem need for the drums I can just massage them in bulk in a more general way from the original clips).
 
So as you see... I'm going a little nutballers on this one. It's already starting to sound great though and is pushing my "skillz" to the max.
 
A lot of work... but very cool stuff.
 
Cheers, buddy.
 
;-)

Since you're diving into this headfirst, may I ask why you're not using Melodyne and the new tempo mapping? Or is that only in Studio? 

@Sander.... I've reviewed some of the materials on the new Melodyne stuff (I haven't installed it yet) and honestly I don't think it's going to give me the finite control I need to make this happen. Also it would be a totally new learning curve and as much as I like Melodyne I find it a little awkward to use compared to just mangling things right inside Sonar.
 
This is extremely fast and transient laden stuff and based on previous tests using my current version of Melodyne (and various other auto transient detection/auto correct tools) it's just much better if I get right into the raw waves and do it all manually by sight and sound.
 
If the material weren't so off beat (like lots of flams and fills) and sonically rich (shreiker vox/heavily distorted guits) then it might be worth the extra study/experimentation but, as I said, based on previous experiences with such tools on this type of material it's actually easier to manipulate it all manually. This also provides much better results.
 
Basically this type of technology is great but it hasn't caught up enough to "blast beat" and shreiker/shredder material.
 
Honestly I don't think it ever really could because how is a program supposed to quantize or anticipate user needs when the material is so complex and erratic.
 
For laid more laid back stuff that actually has something for the program to hook into and correct I'm sure it's great. For this stuff... it still requires a bone bowl full of reasonably proficient grey matter to make the artistic decisions.
 
I should point out that I am trying to preserve as much of the natural performances as possible as opposed to total quantizing and/or applying percentages of quantizing.
 
The clip stretching does this nicely. Like I find a section that speeds up/slow down and choose an "anchor" point before some major change in the song. I make the split there and slip stretch that spot to the appropriate measure. Then everything in that section more or less lines up to the timeline and I haven't thrown transients all over the place willy nilly (with quantize/humanize functions) or ruined the natural flow of the original performance.
 
All the while retaining phase across the tracks.
 
The new Melodyne supposedly takes such things into account but as I said it's not really worth diving balls deep into all that just to find out it's gonna fail like so many other "magic" correction programs have for me in the past.
 
Once I get to the end of this project (the time correction part) I may make a video of the process I'm using on an unfinished song we tracked. Some of the Sonar quirks are massive, time consuming pains in the posterior but the way I'm doing it works amazingly well for final product/sound quality.
 
Anyway... as I said this project/plan has been MANY years in the making and actually one of the three primary reasons I bought Sonar/updated my DAW.
 
1) Was access to virtual instruments to write on my own since I lost my bandroom.
 
2) Have a fully functional DAW to record audio for guit lessons (including MIDI stuff)
 
3) Do this type of intense correction/mixing work on the piles of old band sessions I have kicking around. Essentially at least 4-5 albums worth of stuff from multiple bands that's been languishing as I learned (and continue to learn) the craft.
 
Cheers.

Right. Well makes sense since you're all invested. From the Sound on Sound special the Melodyne tempo manipulation looked great though. I've never had to deal with blast beat though :)