What is that all about? I realize it's in progress, just wondering what it is going to do?

Replace real drums with samples.

Probably similar to drumagog or trigger.

We are assuming it will do what we have always done with Audio Snap but with ( hopefully) huge improvements. 
Right now you can use audio snap to take a snare or kick drum audio recording and convert it to a midi event. Then that midi track can trigger Session Drummer or whatever.
I've used it on live Kick drum lot's with good results. It works best with heavy transient tracks without leakage. Tom tracks with bleed from the rest of the kit are impossible. And forget about cymbals. 
So here's hoping this new toy doesn't have the same issues.  
 
The beauty of drum replacement is you can: 
A-Turn a bad sounding recording of a good drummer into a better sounding recording. 
B- Turn a good or bad recording of a bad drummer into something usable by fixing the timing issues. 
C- Combine both real drums and the samples to make huge sounding kits that will drowned out your terrible singing. ( my ultimate goal) 

I'm guessing it could also have some nice creative applications aside from replacing drums with samples.

My best bet is that it will be based off of the Audio Snap code. Place it on each individual drum track and set it to create a midi note on event which will be routed (hopefully) to the drum sampler of your choice. I would be disappointed if it was tied into Session Drummer exclusively.

Could very well be some filtering settings similar to what's used on compressors for de-easing or keeping low end from triggering the threshold. Maybe this could help with bleed issues.

Toontrack had their drum tracker program that had a similar approach. It was a bit tedious to work with and I ended up using AudioSnap to create midi notes for the drums I wanted to substitute or supplement. I've come to not expect miracles in this sort of plug in. You have to work it.

I went from Drumtracker to Drumagog 4 (then 5 which is 64bit). Then I added Slate's Trigger and then Slate gave us Trigger 2.
 
Both Trigger and and Drumagog use samples triggered by a transient.
 
Drumagog has the "added advantage" of allowing you to load up any VSTi (TT, Slate, BFD3 virtually anything) and it will trigger based on MIDI note.
 
I suspect CWs to be better than Drumtracker and probably not as sophisticated as Drumagog which means it will be very useful to those that have nothing now except the existing AudioSnap method. I too wonder what it will be tied to.

Dave Modisette
My best bet is that it will be based off of the Audio Snap code. Place it on each individual drum track and set it to create a midi note on event which will be routed (hopefully) to the drum sampler of your choice. I would be disappointed if it was tied into Session Drummer exclusively.

I don't think it'll be some sort of plug-in which you route into a sampler ... It's gotta do some "destructive editing" or maybe I should rather call it "bounce audio to MIDI" because eventually you would want MIDI tracks that you can throw the entire power of Sonars MIDI editing at ...
 
I never tried it with Audio snap (let me know if I'm missing out on some benefits) ... but I simply threw (temporary) gating on the audio track (e.g. kick of multi-mic drum recording) to reduce bleed and dragged the audio to a MIDI track, bounced and used ARA functionality to come up with a MIDI track which I then used to layer kick ...
 
I think I even tried with room mics for the fun of it and it must have been melodyne editor in the ARA background which is polyphonic and has what they call DNA (direct note access) for chords and special drum algorithms ... (edit: i just went back and tried that again ... but it's either percussive or polyphonic what they offer, and percusive just extracts the groove to a single MIDI note and polyphonic certainly doesn't like a beat with a lot of crash cymbals masking transients of the other drum hits ... )
 
 

Interesting. So, if I'm understanding this right you could import an mp3/wav drum track, convert that to midi then use ezdrummer or AD2?

Bflat5
Interesting. So, if I'm understanding this right you could import an mp3/wav drum track, convert that to midi then use ezdrummer or AD2?

Of course not a stereo mix of drums. You really want (at least) your kick and snare on separate tracks for this stuff to work best.
 
Now if all you have is a stereo track it's would behoove you to clone that track two more times. Try to eq out all but kick freq on one and all but snare freq on the other. Bear in mind this method would still likely to give you stray MIDI notes depending on the material.
 
A decent drum replacer on a track with just kick or just snare will do an excellent job of detecting the transients and do an excellent job of replacing that.
 
The drag audio to MID can be hit and miss depending on the source material (GIGO as they say).