mettelus
I have gotten into the habit of using loop markers to "constrain" the project when similar happens. It is the easiest work around I could think of since rewind will then stop at the start boundary. I also leave 2 bars of dead space at the beginning of projects (habit since 1998) to avoid the "start at time zero" issues over the years, so most projects have loop markers enabled in them (even though not always on).

That's a good idea in part, but I also use loop markers in other parts of the project too. I'm frequently moving those loop markers around and also hitting rewind a lot to go back to the start. I don't think keeping the loop markers in place would work for me. Also, that doesn't fix the problem of what a train wreck Sonar is when you try to delete time from the middle of a project. If you have things like tempo changes and time sig changes there is no way to do it without manually deleting and moving clips and then manually deleting and recreating your time sigs because Sonar screws it up so badly.

pwalpwal

sharkeI can't believe the Bakers have gone this long thinking that this shouldn't be addressed ASAP.

fwiw, it'll be to do with the effort required to fix it, but if you can think of a way marketing could spin such a fix as a new or improved feature then you may get it sooner rather than later

I honestly think this is part of the problem - how can you possibly put a marketing spin on a "new feature" which should have been implemented years ago as part of basic song editing functionality? Imagine Microsoft marketing a new version of Word: "Coming soon in Word 2016...NEW paragraph deletion functionality! Watch all successive paragraphs shift backwards to fill the gap, retaining all of their formatting! SAFELY edit bodies of text from your documents without worrying about screwing up the rest!" - lol

I also find this more of a problem in the middle of a project, more so than at the beginning.
 
Sharke - I took a look a the procedure you tried above: How are you selecting all the tracks? I ask this because I wonder if doing the following would make a difference:
 
NOTE: I just tried this now on a little test project. I am not actually using this procedure, but am going to try next time I try to remove time.
 
ALSO: I would save the project to a new name and try this on that iteration first.
 
1.  On the keyboard do a CTRL-a to select every track in the project.
2. Use the two "Selection" buttons (mine are on the toolbar near the upper right) using the now time to set the left side at the current start of your song (i.e. bar 42), and the now time to  the end of the song (some bars after the last note of the tune).
3. Then use "Cut Special" and check every box (maybe not "delete whole", since "cut" implies that). I think that "Cutting" might be visually easier to work with that "Copying".
4. Then set the now time to bar 1 and "Paste Special" using "New over Old" and "Paste as New Clips" just like you did, making sure to start at track 1.
 
This is not much different than what you did, but who knows? Maybe it will work.

The way "delete hole" works is totally bananas. To the extent that I can't think of a single positive reason for it to be that way. What possible use case would have me selecting all tracks, selecting a time range, doing "delete hole" and having some, but not all tracks shift along to fill the gap?

To my mind, there's a whole suite of stuff that could be done with what I think of as timeline management. This would include deletion, arrangement, export range and so on. I hope some of that is in the works.
 

sharke

pwalpwal

sharkeI can't believe the Bakers have gone this long thinking that this shouldn't be addressed ASAP.

fwiw, it'll be to do with the effort required to fix it, but if you can think of a way marketing could spin such a fix as a new or improved feature then you may get it sooner rather than later

I honestly think this is part of the problem - how can you possibly put a marketing spin on a "new feature" which should have been implemented years ago as part of basic song editing functionality?

how about: "coming in 2016 - improved project timeline management - easily manage tempo changes, hole deletion, audiosnap, markers 2.0, etc"? if they can do it for the add track dialog...

I will even give a suggestion of how to make it happen.. 
 
edit: that got the ball rolling on getting ideas of how to implement, so my simple suggestion isn't useful any more.
 
gabo

rbecker
I also find this more of a problem in the middle of a project, more so than at the beginning.
 
Sharke - I took a look a the procedure you tried above: How are you selecting all the tracks? I ask this because I wonder if doing the following would make a difference:
 
NOTE: I just tried this now on a little test project. I am not actually using this procedure, but am going to try next time I try to remove time.
 
ALSO: I would save the project to a new name and try this on that iteration first.
 
1.  On the keyboard do a CTRL-a to select every track in the project.
2. Use the two "Selection" buttons (mine are on the toolbar near the upper right) using the now time to set the left side at the current start of your song (i.e. bar 42), and the now time to  the end of the song (some bars after the last note of the tune).
3. Then use "Cut Special" and check every box (maybe not "delete whole", since "cut" implies that). I think that "Cutting" might be visually easier to work with that "Copying".
4. Then set the now time to bar 1 and "Paste Special" using "New over Old" and "Paste as New Clips" just like you did, making sure to start at track 1.
 
This is not much different than what you did, but who knows? Maybe it will work.

 
I do virtually the same except I select the range by dragging in the time ruler. 

When I read your post I wondered why I didn't use "cut special" and then "paste special." Upon trying it I remembered why, because I've been down that route before. After using cut special, paste special actually pasted all the clips at the start of the timeline as required, but in new friggin tracks. That's right, Sonar created a whole new set of tracks to paste the clips into. So I ended up with a new track for every track that had clips in it. That's just reintroduced me to yet another thing that sent my blood pressure through the roof in the past. HA!

Ok so I've been doing some experimentation with cut special and paste special, and I've managed to paste the clips into the start of the project in their original tracks. I didn't do anything differently, I just tried it a few more times, so maybe when it pasted the clips into new tracks that was a bug, I don't know. Anyway just the usual inconsistent mess .
 
But as you can see from these new before and after pics, time signature changes have not been moved properly. You can see the time sig changes from the spacing of the vertical lines. The song starts in 4/4, has a section of 6/8 a little later and then changes to 6/4 toward the end of the track. The clips in the "after" shot are completely out of whack with the time signatures. I had "time signatures" checked at all stages. 
 
Here's before:
 

 
And after:

 
 

I agree that "real" ripple editing would be a useful feature. It's something I depend on in Vegas. I think one of the main problems with "Delete Hole" stems from a decision not to cut MIDI notes in the process.
 
In the spirit of full disclosure, it doesn't affect me that much. I always leave a measure at the beginning to allow for taking a "noiseprint" when mastering. And, my songwriting approach is more modular with grouped clips, so I just move things around on the timeline rather than cutting and such. (This is also why an Arranger function isn't that important to me, songs are created with arranging in mind.) However even though I don't need to Delete Hole often, when I do it takes effort to get it right.
 
So at this point rather than discuss what doesn't work I think it would be more productive to throw out some solutions. Here's a proposed workflow that hopefully wouldn't be too hard to implement.
 

• Change "Insert Time/Measures" to "Insert/Remove Time/Measures."
• Place the Now time where you either want to add measures going forward, or remove measures going backward.
• Specify the the number of measures, then specify add or remove. If remove, choose whether to Ripple Edit or just leave the measures blank.

 
If remove/ripple edit, the previous X number of measures prior to the now time and everything contained in those measures (and to keep this simple I mean everything, including things like program changes, time signature changes, groove pitch markers, tempo changes, etc.) would be removed and the hole would close up automatically. Again to keep this simple, if MIDI notes cross over the boundaries of the area to be removed, they would be split at the boundaries. 
 
This would assume you would do any "housekeeping" of elements you didn't want removed beforehand, e.g., place a time signature change, key change, etc. just before or after the hole.
 
Again, there's the standard caveat of "I don't know anything about code" but it seems this "meat cleaver" approach would be the simplest way to implement what people seem to want.