This has always driven me crazy with SONAR but at least before X3 I was always able to fidget with it to make it work right. The short question is: How the heck do I set up SONAR so that my audio files NEVER CHANGE length/position etc if the tempo happens to change? I DO NOT have groove clip looping on, but plain as day, if I change the tempo, my clips decide to stretch - screwing my project up big time. What I want is for my clips to be left alone ... stay time based (eg 33.45 seconds), just like they were recorded and not measure based.
 
So:
 
1. How do i fix the current clips/project so this doesn't happen
2. How do I set up SONAR so that it NEVER does this when I record.
 
Thanks!

OK - changing my clips all to "absolute" time base solved the current issue. How do I set SONAR to use that as the default for all audio clips?

they may not be groove clips but is it possible these clips are acidized ?
you could always just right click the clip / choose bounce to clips.
this will ensure its just an audio file now with no groove clip properties.
then tempo changes should not affect clips from moving.
 
also make sure "stretch to tempo" is not checked on your clips (see:in the inspector.)

The M:B:T ruler is the fixed visual time reference in SONAR. It doesn't change when you change tempo; the Now time just speeds up or slows down accordingly. This means audio clips will appear to change length when you change tempo, but their absolute playback tempo and duration won't change.
 
What does change with tempo is the absolute start time of both MIDI and Audio. By default, the timebase for both audio and MIDI is Musical time; it affects only the start time not the absolute length/duration of the clip. This means the start time of a clip will follow the tempo change. An audio clip that starts at 9:01:000 will continue to start at that measure. This makes sense in most instances, and is what you would want if you were enabling autostretch on audio clips so they can actually follow the M:B:T tempo change.

Hi - thanks - i did figure out to set it to absolute and not musical time. I'm not doing any "acidy" type stuff ... so for me, I NEVER want my clips to "follow" MBT. So the question is how to get SONAR to do "Absolute time" base as the default for me?

I'm pretty sure you cannot change the default timebase. But depending on what you're wanting to accomplish with changing the tempo, you might want to try using Set Measure/Beat At Now instead of manually entering tempo changes. SM/BAN automatically maintains absolute timing of both MIDI and Audio as it inserts tempos to fit the timeline to the performance.