We REALLY need some easy way to remove time from a project

I can't believe how many times this has frustrated me with Sonar. You want to remove a portion of time from the start of a song. You want everything within those measures to be deleted, and everything which remains to shift along by that number of measures to the left. This should be doable with a simple, hassle free, bug free and foolproof one click method. It shouldn't matter whether or not there is data on every track in the area you want to delete. It shouldn't matter whether or not there is data on any of the tracks. You are simply deleting time. If there's data within that time, delete it. If there isn't, why should Sonar care? Shift everything else along to the left to fill the hole, retaining all clip positions in relation to each other. You shouldn't have to lasso anything and manually drag it. You shouldn't have to worry about whether or not you've selected the automation with your clips. In the vast majority of cases, you want that automation to move with the clips it was automating. 
 
Why is this so hard in Sonar? Whenever I have to do this I end up tearing my hair out and seriously think about switching DAW's. I love this program but there are some aspects of it that just defy belief and this is one of them. 
 
This question has been asked by people on the forum SO many times and in every case people chime in with this long drawn out convoluted process of inserting dummy clips, setting snap, using "Delete special" and then lassoing stuff to shift it across manually. Anyone reading the manual's explanation of how to delete time is going to be horribly confused and frustrated, as am I whenever I read it. I just tried it on a project that had data on some of the tracks in the area I wanted to delete. I selected all tracks, selected the measures on the time ruler, chose "delete special," ticked all the boxes and yet some of the tracks moved across while others stayed where they were. It did not work as expected at all because the tracks which did not contain data weren't shifted across while the ones which did contain data were shifted. But they were only shifted to the point at which their data started, not to the start of the time range which I specified. And then of course, the tracks were out of whack with each other. This is horrible and I can't believe we're still dealing with it in Sonar 2016. 
 
How come we get "style dials" which give us a  quick "one knob" way of adding effects, while such a basic song arranging operation as deleting time and plugging the gap has this horribly awkward and confusing process which everyone dreads doing? How many times have you been put off improving or experimenting with the arrangement of your music because things like this are so unbelievably annoying and error prone in Sonar? 
 
So to recap, a "delete time" function should:
 
1) Delete ALL data in the area you specify
2) Move ALL data to the left to fill the gap. 
 
No nonsense, no worrying about tracks losing their relationship with each other, no manual selecting and dragging of clips, just the simple process as described in bold above, something which should be as simple as deleting a word in a word processor and having the remaining text reposition itself to fill the hole. Please! 

And what makes it all worse is that if you DO choose to go down the "delete everything in the space you wish to delete then drag everything else across" route, that doesn't take into account things like time signature or tempo changes. So you have to go down the road of inserting dummy clips on every track so that you can use "delete special" and its associated options to shift across sigs and tempos. 
 
I can't believe the Bakers have gone this long thinking that this shouldn't be addressed ASAP. 

I have to admit this always frustrates me too. When it's the beginning of a project it's less important, I'll just move my starting point. But sometimes I have to delete a section in the middle and inevitably something will be screwed up and require manual repositioning. I completely agree; deleting time from a project should DELETE TIME, not just time on those tracks where there happen to be clips in that section.

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).

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).

I must remember that one.
Which makes me remember that I've often  wished to have the ability to add  another marker row (or more).
IMO it would be quite handy. One row would relate to, say, song structure and the other
to arrangement decisions/plans or whatever.

Hear Hear. I'v had clips move to unexpected places too. Extremely frustrating. More than once i've had our drummer replay the whole song because I couldn't rearrange two perfect partial-takes. Multitracks with grouped clips just going wonkers all the time and doing things manually just f@(#s up my markers....

I agree to this thread, but it won't make me choose another DAW because there are so many beautiful features in SONAR... But as often about software, the most basic features are those which doesn't work well or which are not fixed. Microsoft and Google are very good for this...
Personally I never like when I realize that I will have to insert or delete measures. I know that I will lose 15 or 30 minutes to try it several times and then to listen to my whole project to be sure that all is OK. That's a pity.

Totally agree Sharke. 
 
Is this a bug or a feature request?
 
Ripple Delete would be nice!
 
Jesse Q. Screed

I agree with the frustration level on removing a section of a project and having to deal with non adjusted time lines and tempos.  Plus 1 to make this easier in a future release.
 
Now, I am not at my DAW but I do vaguely remember taking care of this by doing a massive CUT and PASTE, that is, moving the sections that needed to fill the deleted time instead of deleting the section.  I think it moved the project correctly the last time I tried this but it has been awhile since I needed to do this and I probably am mistaken.
 
Jim

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.

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.

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.
 

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

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: