I want to get good at using real drums and converting/quantizing them etc.  Is drum replacer the best way to go?

it depends, if you want to keep the original drums you have recorded then no, Autosnap is the best way to go.
it is very time consuming and tedious but it works. 
 

Will melodyne work?

WSS

Audiosnap is the best way to go. There is an old post by Lord Tim that gives a very good work flow for doing this. Do a search for it and you'll find it. 
 
Basically it outlines how to take a snare or kick track, copy it, use a very aggressive gate on it, so aggressive that it only leaves a blip for the hard hits. You'll now use this track as a guide track to accurately get the transients across all your tracks. Audiosnap doesn't really do a very good job so getting this track right is imperative to getting a good guide track with accurate transients identified.
 
Then turn transients on for all the tracks, set all the other tracks to 100% so NO transients are shown. Set the transients on this guide track to something sensible, maybe 50% or so to get the transients desired.
 
Manually make sure you have all the transients you want showing on the guide track. 
 
Then merge and lock the transients from the guide track across all the multitrack drums. You'll then have to unlock the tracks so you can move them. 
 
Now you can select all the tracks (a track selection group helps here) and manually move the transients across all tracks simultaneously to align them with the grid how you like. 
 
It's a tedious process, but works wonders. If you also want to overlay drums from AD2 or Session Drummer, you can use the guide track to copy the midi notes and overlay a snare or kick (whichever track you used) or use the same gating technique to create midi notes for other drums. 
 
gabo

OR- what I did was sample the real drums, edit them and put them in  Session drummer to play certain parts mixed in with the real stuff. Best of both worlds.  I find Hi Hats and cymbals tricky, drum replacer makes a huge mess of them. And it seems to only use it's own sounds..   Audio snap usually sends me running for a stiff drink! But it can glean a usable kick and snare drum midi track.   The rest, forget it... If you can tighten up the kick and snare it will make a huge difference to a sloppy drum take. 
So I mix the real with the midi and my drummer is never told about it.. all he hears is his drums and of course remembers playing perfectly :)  

Thank you guys.  I will search for that post
 

@Cactus Music - I am pretty sure you can use your own sounds in Drum Replacer.

I seem to remember experimenting with it when it came out. Just as a test to learn to use it, I took some Simon Phillips drum loops (long ones), and used drum replacer to replace them all with one shots from the same Simon Phillips library.

I seem to remember that the results were pretty good, and sounded VERY similar to the original loops.

Now I know this may seem a pointless exercise, but I did it to familiarise myself with Drum Replacer. If the drumming had been sloppy and badly recorded. (i e. not Simon Phillips in a top studio), then i would have been able to tidy it up, etc.

Sorry for all the waffle. I am stuck in hospital again, and they're running over an hour late.. 😉

I didn't go find Lord Tim's post. But I did find that I had copied the note and put it in a safe place on my computer. So all the credit for the following goes to Lord Tim! I just cut n pasted it from his post so these are all his words!
 
I will say that I have used this method and it works very well. The only change I have made to it, is instead of adding the transients to the pool, I just merged and locked the transients across the tracks. Either way works just as well.
 
1. Record the drums (duh)

2. Find out which tracks are the main timing guides - usually kick and snare tracks. Clone them.

3. Solo the cloned tracks. On the clones, you want to aggressively gate the hell out of them so you're just getting the initial pop on the start of each hit and nothing else - the track has to be completely silent between hits. It'll sound like garbage, but that's not the point - we're not going to be using these for anything other than our timing guide.

4. Bounce those gated tracks to a new track. That's going to be your guide track now. You can either mute or delete those original cloned and gated tracks now.

5. Enable Audiosnap on all of your tracks, including the new guide track. On the Audiosnap palette, drag the Threshold slider all the way up to 100%. This will make every transient on all of the tracks disappear.

6. On your guide track, lower the Threshold until you get a useful amount of transients turn up. If you're lucky, they'll be on every hit, and if you're even more lucky, you won't need to go in and manually move anything to be on the beat and you're good to go.

7. More than likely things will need adjusting, so zoom in on your guide track with the transients and move, add or delete transient markers until you have one on every hit. Getting your guide right is crucial to this all working well.

8. Right-click the guide track, go to Pool > Add Clip to Pool. All of the transients will turn blue, telling you they've been added to the pool.

9. Select all of the other drum tracks, right click on any one of them and go to Pool > Apply transient pool markers. You'll see transient lines appear on all of the clips that line up with the blue transients in the guide track.

10. Select all of the tracks (including the guide), right click any one of them and go to Quantize and make sure Audiosnap Beats is checked. Quantize to taste.

That should get you 95% of the way there. Mute the guide track and listen back - has the quantizing put beats in the wrong place? You need to go back and manually adjust things. Turn your Snap on, find the beat that's not correct, left-mouse lasso around the transients that are on the wrong beat so they're selected across all of the tracks, and drag to the correct position.

All where it should be? Great! This is using the Online stretch algorithm so it won't sound amazing, so you'll need to bounce all of the tracks to new clips so it uses the better quality Offline algorithm. Delete the guide track and you're done!

Things to consider:

This is locking things up pretty tight. If you don't want things quite as tight, you can play around with groove quantizing and things like that. It's fiddly and results are honestly hit and miss.

The reason I went to the trouble of making these guide tracks is because transient detection currently sucks whenever there's any slight bit of noise other than what you want to detect on a track. It's almost to the point of being unworkable, in fact in the past I've gone through and manually placed transients because it's been quicker doing that than fixing all of the wrong ones SONAR has "helpfully" put in for me. The guide tracks cut out a LOT of unwanted track bleed and DRAMATICALLY help the detection algorithm.

If you need timing from something like a hi-hat or an overhead mic or something, honestly, save yourself the headache and manually put transients in. It'll be about as much work doing that as fixing SONAR's mistakes and you'll likely do a better job at it. 

Westside Steve Simmons
Will melodyne work?

WSS

I have the upgrade to Melodyne 4 Editior. 
The stand alone version is amazing at detecting tempo and correcting it.
I have not had good luck dragging tracks into the timeline within Sonar.
 
I use Drum Replacer more as more as a drum enhancer. Mostly to add a little punch to the kick or snare.
 

HighAndDry
I want to get good at using real drums and converting/quantizing them etc.  

this is a major contradiction in itself.
 
if you want to get good at using real drums you should not use any quantizing at all. it will just ruin it all.
 
get a good drummer, learn how to properly mic a drum kit so you can comp multi-tracked takes, etc ...
 
this is time consuming and expensive (mics and room) and will take a while until you can match sound quality from today's sample libs.