I have a piece of about a dozen tracks, with lots of clips of 4-8 bars each, as I've been recording the thing in pieces. If I decide to insert music in the middle of the piece it is a constant source of frustration to slide over some clips to make room, it's extremely trying and prone to error. No matter which way I try, Sonar does something to make it difficult. I simply don't understand the usage patterns for people testing this software, to let something so seemingly basic remain so difficult. Imagine if adding a paragraph into the middle of a Word document took all this extra effort. Completely un-musical and gets me out of my work flow every time. OK, that's my rant.
 
SELECTING CLIPS
I attempt to right click and drag over the clips I want to move. If this selection covers more than a couple tracks, Sonar decides I want to select a whole bunch of other clips I didn't even drag over. For example, selecting all clips from bars 10-20 will cause clips from bars 1-10 to be selected as well. Why is this? I didn't tell it I wanted those clips. The lousy solution is to drag small number of clips, and repeat over and over until all of them are moved. Time-consuming and extremely prone to error. And don't get me started on tracks with multiple takes in them...
 
INSERTING MEASURES
First off, WHY ARE ALL THE INSERT OPTIONS NOT IN THE INSERT MENU???? I have to remember to go to Project Menu to Insert, and NOT to the frickin' INSERT MENU. Boggles the mind, frankly. Anyway, Insert Time/Measures causes tons of problems because of pickups and any notes which happen to anticipate the beat by even a tiny amount. I end up with all these little clip slivers and notes in the wrong place, and end up taking enormous time fixing that. The other option is to move all those anticipating notes right onto the downbeat, effectively changing my music to satisfy the software, not to mention time-consuming. Why can't Sonar be more intelligent and musical about this? 
 
Do people just not insert bars into the middles of their pieces? How do people deal with this? It's immensely frustrating. Cue up my Grammy-acceptance speech in which I say "A big no thank you to Sonar for making everything take twice as long as it ought to".

jkoseattle
effectively changing my music to satisfy the software

This is a profound observation, and it applies to many other applications than Sonar. Contemporary music that is so often created in the box is just not as sensitive to these issues as a live group playing ensemble. The measure bars are just an imaginary convention, like the note divisions, and produce a pretty crude quantization. In reality music is made and heard in time, not metronome clicks, and cutting to the bar is a compromise. People reading notated music learn to interpret them as more or less authoritative suggestions, but getting a computer to recognize that an anticipated or continued note should be carried across the bar is not simple, and a computer that would recognize such musical issues would have to be a monster. This is not entirely a computer issue, however. Try cutting a magnetic tape with a razor in such a way that it would manage the task. Even musicians tend to make their playing more mechanical to match the click track so that their performance can be integrated with other musicians who are recording solo in a separate time and place. We do hear different music in the contemporary world of audio editing than we would hear in a good performance without the editing. Sometimes better, sometimes not. 
 
 

I've never had an issue with surgically adding, deleting, copying, moving, inserting blocks of songs, measures, parts of measures, repeats of choruses, repeats of verses, anything...

That's because I adopted using the Select By Time choice under the Edit menu early on and it's now second nature. Takes seconds on any decision or update.

If you need to add a chorus somewhere, for example, find where on the timeline you want the insert to occur. Figure out how much space you want to add, or just add wild extra, just not too little. Like say you need to add 4 measures. Then Control A (Select All) for the tracks.

1. Use Select By Time to select the range from where you want the insert to occur.
2. Cut Special to grab everything (including markers. (Control Shift X)
3. Paste Special to the starting point of where you want the cut portion repositioned (like 4 measures forward from where the cut occurred).
4. Now you have the 4 measure hole. You can use Select By Time to copy a 4 measure chunk and Paste Special into that spot.

It takes seconds.

It's surgical, way better than grabbing blobs or measures because there are many circumstances where you want to grab ranges that are very specific, down to beats or ticks.

Easy and fast. And convenient. Once you've done it a time or two you don't even think about it, you just move stuff around like Legos.

I get that, and I've done that method before. But it really is just a different way of selecting by dragging in the timeline bar. Same problem, in that it doesn't take anticipation of the beat into account. So if you say "Start at 218.00.000" -- (Another gripe - Why not include marker names? Why such tiny and completely useless plus and minus buttons on the fields? Ridiculous.) -- you aren't going to get that one note in that one track that starts a few ticks before that. 
 
I disagree that it would take a monster computer to recognize such issues. I work in software, it's not a terribly difficult problem to at least make easier for the user. How about when selecting you have the option to select back a given amount to pull those notes in. Or an "include any notes which fall mostly within the selection" or provide a little graphic indicating which clips you've selected might contain something you want to also select and letting us decide. A hundred ways to solve it.

jkoseattle
First off, WHY ARE ALL THE INSERT OPTIONS NOT IN THE INSERT MENU???? I have to remember to go to Project Menu to Insert, and NOT to the frickin' INSERT MENU. Boggles the mind, frankly.

The Project menu deals with functionality that affects the entire project. The Insert menu deals with functionality that's a subset of a project.

jkoseattle
[... redacted]
So if you say "Start at 218.00.000" -- (Another gripe - Why not include marker names? Why such tiny and completely useless plus and minus buttons on the fields? Ridiculous.) -- you aren't going to get that one note in that one track that starts a few ticks before that. 
 
[... redacted]
How about when selecting you have the option to select back a given amount to pull those notes in. Or an "include any notes which fall mostly within the selection" or provide a little graphic indicating which clips you've selected might contain something you want to also select and letting us decide. A hundred ways to solve it.

If you post these two ideas as feature requests, I'd certainly vote for them. They'd be huge time savers and would add a great deal of value to the workflow. As obvious as some ideas may be to you, they may not have occurred to anyone else (or they may have but have been back-burnered for any number of reasons.)
 
In any case, it is decidedly in my interest to urge you to consider issuing formal feature requests for any other excellent ideas you may happen to give birth to in the future. 
 

The second FR should probably be pretty tightly defined before making a request. SONAR is not going to know what notes would qualify as being "mostly" within a selection, you need to put some numbers on it...like if more than 50% of a note is in a selection, or more than a third. Of course you'd also need a way to defeat that, so I guess that would need to be a preference, or a keyboard modifier...anyway, the more precisely a process can be defined, the greater the odds of it being put in the constantly growing feature request queue. 
 

jkoseattle
Do people just not insert bars into the middles of their pieces? How do people deal with this?

What I do is in Week 76 of Friday's Tip of the Week. Whether it's compatible with your workflow or not, I have no idea but it works for me. In addition to moving around sections, I'm always inserting beats and measures in songs because of my particular workflow with songwriting. In the Week 76 tip, make sure you read the comments about complications when you try to split a MIDI note. 

Anderton
The second FR should probably be pretty tightly defined before making a request. SONAR is not going to know what notes would qualify as being "mostly" within a selection, you need to put some numbers on it...like if more than 50% of a note is in a selection, or more than a third. Of course you'd also need a way to defeat that, so I guess that would need to be a preference, or a keyboard modifier...anyway, the more precisely a process can be defined, the greater the odds of it being put in the constantly growing feature request queue. 

That's actually pretty straightforward if you keep your clips tidy. If a clip is selected, move the whole thing (unless the optional "split clips crossing boundaries" is checked).
 
Dan
 
 

AndertonSONAR is not going to know what notes would qualify as being "mostly" within a selection, you need to put some numbers on it...like if more than 50% of a note is in a selection, or more than a third.

a "cross over" setting is definitely a good idea, as "mostly" means by definition the majority of something. more than half, so >50%

I have referenced the OP in a feature request here:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Timeline-CuttyPasty-should-be-EASY-Like-editing-a-stereo-wav-file-m3376561.aspx
 
If you feel it deserves its own FR then please submit a separate one accordingly.