After some recent successes posting questions about Take Lanes here, I thought I'd try another one, which is another frustrating time-waste for me, and that is "vertical editing". I'm sure there is an official term for this, but what I refer to simply "This 2-bar break needs to be 6 bars" which requires me to insert 4 new bars in the middle of my project and sliding everything over that comes after.
 
With the abysmal vertical scrolling implementation in X3, and that sheer number of tracks in my projects, it's very cumbersome to lasso clips and slide that way, but selecting all tracks and then changing the starting point of the selection is tricky because pickups and downbeats that I anticipated by a fraction of a second will be missed. What I end up doing is a combination, where I select all tracks from a certain point to the end, and then track by track do a Ctrl-right click on any clips with a pickup or rushed downbeat. Made more difficult by the fact that some tracks have multiple clips in them, so I might have to open the take lanes and look clip by clip. Invariably, I miss one or three, and have to recreate pickups or rushed notes and delete them from the part that didn't slide. Anyway, it's a huge PITA, just to satisfy a simple thing like inserting extra bars.
 
The above is for dragging clips, which is bad if I have markers or tempo changes or time sig changes, unless I go in and make sure those get moved when I drag. 
 
The other method of course is to use Insert Time/Measures, which is a "dumb" function in that it has no concept of pickups or beat anticipation at all, it just dumbly inserts measures in the project, splitting clips willy-nilly and essentially making something of a mess of my project.
 
(Side note: but I still scratch my head in annoyed wonderment that Inserting measures in a project is not found in THE FRICKIN;' INSERT MENU!!!) And when I open the Insert Time/Measures dialog, I have to manually select that I want everything to slide along with the clips. Why isn't that the default? It's as if Cakewalk wanted to make this entire simple thing take as many steps and mouse clicks as possible.
 
It just seems like such a simple thing. Is there a simple way to do this that I'm missing?

As with Take Lanes, I think you're overthinking this. I'm not quite sure exactly what the problem is with inserting measures, given that your initial example is you want to add four measures; is there a reason why the following won't do what you want?
 
1. Place the Now time wherever you want to start adding the measures (turn off snap if you want to put the Now time before pickups as opposed to some measure or other rhythmic boundary).
2. Type ctrl-A to select all tracks, then type S to split at the now time.
3. Use Project > Insert Time/Measures. All tracks will now be moved to the right by the amount you specified.
 
Also don't forget that you can slip-edit multiple clips if you select multiple clips. For example, if in the part leading up to where you added the measures you want to regain the pickups in anticipation of whatever you'll be inserting in those four measures, select all the clips whose right edge borders against the space, and slip-edit to the right.
 
If pertinent, remember to specify that envelopes should move with the clips.
 

Hmm, does that mean I can regain the lost pickups by slip editing the left edge of the clips that have slid over too? That might be helpful. I can try splitting the clips at the Now time and then insert, like you listed, but in that case is there any point to first splitting them? Once I insert time/measures, doesn't that split them too? I think it's just a matter of finding the correct Now time and not messing with clips at all. And if I can slip edit the few notes I may have missed on either end of the insert, maybe this wouldn't be so bad.

jkoseattle
Hmm, does that mean I can regain the lost pickups by slip editing the left edge of the clips that have slid over too?

 
Sonar's editing is non-destructive. What you edit is still available to the clip as long as you don't explicitly trim the clip.
 

 I can try splitting the clips at the Now time and then insert, like you listed, but in that case is there any point to first splitting them?

 
Not really. I only mentioned that because you referred to clips being split "willy nilly" which made no sense to me - when you insert, it splits clips in a very predictable way. So I thought you might be doing something weird, and if you could place the cursor and split it yourself, you'd be in more of a comfort zone.
 

Once I insert time/measures, doesn't that split them too?

 
Yes.
 

I think it's just a matter of finding the correct Now time and not messing with clips at all. And if I can slip edit the few notes I may have missed on either end of the insert, maybe this wouldn't be so bad.

 
Don't forget that you can select multiple clips; dragging one drags them all. And don't forget to specify that the envelope move with the clip, if in fact that's what you want.

It's also worth remembering that using Insert Time/Measures is the only way to ensure that any markers, tempo changes, meter/key changes and envelopes nodes also "slide over" when you create blank space.

Anderton
Don't forget that you can select multiple clips; dragging one drags them all. And don't forget to specify that the envelope move with the clip, if in fact that's what you want.

Which brings me to the vertical scrolling problem. It's hard to drag-select and scroll, and it's near impossible to view a whole project without vertical scrolling.
 
This morning I needed to trim all the first 2 minutes off a project. I determined the ideal Now time, then used Ctrl-A and the Select From = Start option and everything seemed to go ok. 
 
By "willy nilly" just meant that if a clip has a pickup, and you insert measures at the downbeat, you now have an orphan clip with just the pickup note in it. Willy nilly refers to the fact that Sonar splits clips without any intelligence as to why that clip might need to stay together. I guess what I would like is an option to never split a clip unless I do it myself explicitly. So if I inserted measures somewhere that happens to cross the middle of a clip, it will move over the whole clip or none of the clip, depending on, perhaps, which side the majority of the clip was on.
 
Anyway, I think I can handle things better now. Thank you!

jkoseattle - first, are you actually in Seattle? Just wondering.

But to the point, I use another approach because I typically have 100+ tracks in a song and I frequently move stuff around. I use Control A, which selects all tracks, then under the Edit menu there is Select by Time. I pick any range I want down to the tick, then I can copy, or cut that section. If I use Control Alt C ( copy special) I can copy markers or whatever in addition to the track events.

Control alt V (paste special) enables me to paste at exactly the spot I want, and I can choose whether I want to include markers etc. Super easy and surgically precise every time. No guesswork.

lawajava: That sounds good, I can try that. I never remember how many ticks in a tablespoon, but I can figure it out.
 
Yes. I'm in Seattle. Born and raised. My work is even produced under the name Jim of Seattle.
http://www.greenmonkeyrecords.com/wordpress/catalog_Jim_Famous.php