What is more important for me is how any music moves you emotionally. If it succeeds on that level then it has succeeded. Whether the music was created with or without a click is actually not important then if you look at it this way.
 
This might sound weird but Kraftwerk for example moved me a lot (at the time) and yet all that music was done to perfect time. (and I mean perfect) There are millions of examples of incredible electronic music that was all click based and quantised.
 
I agree though total live is also very cool and can just sound amazing. What is very exciting though is a combination of both. Like tracking an amazing live ensemble with no click involved. Then go in and tempo map a DAW session to that live performance. Leave the live perf totally alone. Now your DAW bars and beats are locked to that. You can overdub, quantise do anything and all the DAW stuff will assume the time and feel of the live players. Hopefully we will be heading into this new territory.
 
I believe the next major upgrade of Studio One is going to feature this sort of stuff big time. (maybe in connection with Notion software) Hope so anyway. It can be done now but it is a bit slow and laborious. We need to get that process way faster. The trick with all this as I said before is in the quality of the live players to start with. When they are good this sounds incredible.

I think the click track is catching a lot of undue flak in this thread. I completely agree that music should sound naturally flowing (assuming that is what the style requires). But it's not the actual slow downs and speed ups that make the music sound natural (and if it was, it's super easy to program them into a DAW), it's that the musician is "selling" you HIS sense of time. It has to sound as if HE is determining the tempo. That is entirely possible to do even when playing with a click. In many styles the drummer is trying to play as tight as possible anyway, and the rest of the musicians are "aiming" for the drummer usually. So nothing changes as long as the drummer can really internalize the click and not sound as if he is constantly correcting to it.

I still learn something new every day with this software.  Craig, I didn't even know you could do time stretching this way while holding the ctrl key down and dragging by the top corner on the end of the song.  Very cool.  Much easier than how I was doing this in the past.

MakeShift
I still learn something new every day with this software.  Craig, I didn't even know you could do time stretching this way while holding the ctrl key down and dragging by the top corner on the end of the song.  Very cool.  Much easier than how I was doing this in the past.

It's also an easy way to create loops that conform to tempo if you don't want to do the full acidization thing.

Motown and some of The Beatles songs have the best groove Quantize ever. The Pulse is changing through-out and we all LOVE IT!
Zap!

slartabartfast
There is an internal clock in the brain...

 
Drat! Mine's always running behind!

zapotec
Motown and some of The Beatles songs have the best groove Quantize ever. The Pulse is changing through-out and we all LOVE IT!
Zap!

I did a little practice with audiosnap yesterday by loading up some Jamey Aebersold jazz improvisation accompaniment tracks.  It is possible that some of those recordings are done with click tracks, but the ones I worked on ended up with a tempo map that went up and down by as much as 5 BPM throughout the whole song.  This is a very natural feel, and definitely not robotic.

i don't want to confuse things here but sometimes, when the drums are NOT in the POCKET (behind the pocket)... a song can sound like it drags... just changing the drums to be slightly out of pocket (pushing the rhythm) can do the same thing as speeding up the song. :-)
 
JK

Very true. Relative position of the different drum instruments matters a lot too. As does the position if the bass guitar. And all the other instruments haha

chuckebaby
the same can be said for slowing a piece down as well.
just a few seconds.
 
you can hear a lot more in a song with a slower tempo than a song with a faster tempo
this does not apply to all situations but I think you know what I mean.

We had a song a couple of years ago which just felt wrong, tempo-wise.
So I slowed it down a bit and everyone who heard it said wow! what have you done to it?