Hello Everyone,
 
I thought I would just pose this question.   How do you move entire parts of a song, or swap parts?  Say you wanna move a bridge piece before the chorus instead of after, or say you want to swap Verse 2 and Verse 3?  Or better yet, say you want to re-record all the parts of your Middle 8, but you want to save the old tracks?   I end up moving way out past the end of the song, but I feel I am doing it wrong.  

By the way, all my tracks are MIDI/Softsynth while doing this (just thought I should mention it).
 
How do you guys move around your tracks.  I'm not a fan of Matrix view, but maybe I should?
 
Thank you,
Adam

You can create additional tracks and copy the pieces to those new tracks in the order you want, then mute the old tracks and you have not lost anything. If you have major stuff to move you can create a whole new project and copy between projects. Cutting and pasting and hoping you can get back via a series of undo's is more risky.

slartabartfast
You can create additional tracks and copy the pieces to those new tracks in the order you want, then mute the old tracks and you have not lost anything. If you have major stuff to move you can create a whole new project and copy between projects. Cutting and pasting and hoping you can get back via a series of undo's is more risky.

Yea, I do this now, but it seems messy and "not the right way".   Imagine I have 16 tracks that I want to re-record but save what I have, I'd have to create 16 new tracks and copy the data to them.  Seems like a messy solution. 

I am looking into Matrix view for this, but it seems like if the song is already recorded, this can't help much, but still reading.

Select the clips you want to move as a block, right-click on one of them, then select "Create Selection Group from Selected Clips." Now you can move them around as a single block.
 
There are other options, but that seems closest to what you want. You can move, ctrl+drag to copy, etc. You can also click+drag to slip edit starts or ends of the entire group.
 
Look up Clip Groups in the documentation - you can do all kinds of other cool tricks like automatically group clips while doing multitrack recording.

Craig, you're really helpful... I've wondered this from time to time (there's soooo much to know my brain gets lost) and you just made sense of why I would want to use the "Clip Groups".... I assume you mean highlighting (shading) the zone you want to move....by left clicking the mouse and dragging it across the area to be moved... (seem to remember you got to check a whole bunch of stuff off someplace the make sure everything moves like automation... from another thread)
 
Simple and elegant...

Craig is amazing, I've learned so much from him (Thanks Craig!)   Yea, sometimes it's just all too much to remember (but not for Craig lol)
 
Im checking out the Matrix View... I'm starting to like it, seems like there is a way I could use it to make this work, but still trying to figure that out.   I figured out how to drag my entire middle 8 or verse into a column, but then how to shift them around, swap places and things like that, well... still working on that.  :)
 
Thanks Craig!

I too would love to use Matrix View for song arranging but it seems to be full of bugs and nobody here can shed much light on it. Like the Step Sequencer, it seems to have been added in to make sure Sonar had feature parity with some of the other DAWs, but fixing and improving them is not a core priority because few people seem to actually use these features.
 
I have 2 methods I currently use to arrange songs within Sonar, neither ideal. The first is to drag around all the clips to select them, drag them to the new position, followed by manually moving any markers. The second method is to select the area I want and cut it out before pasting it elsewhere - this often goes wrong if I'm not careful to make sure I have every track selected because everything after it can be moved along by different amounts.
 
I just realised the other day that the clip-grouping thing would help me a lot with the arranging so I'll probably do more of that in future. It's just a real shame that markers can't be drag-selected like clips. It's probably also best to slip-edit all the clips to measure boundaries first so that you don't end up with weird crossfades. You can manually apply crossfades later once the song structure is chosen.
 
If I want to re-record a section, I just select the lot and mute them (press K, I think). The new recordings will go in a different take lane. Then I can listen to each take and decide which one to keep. Make sure you're in Sound On Sound recording mode, not Overwrite.