I'm one of those who never liked Take Lanes in X2, and have been staying away from the feature for long, but today I decided to give it another try, in X3c.
 
Apart from my long-time wondering why the muted MIDI clips have to show up in the track when the lanes are collapsed and why the copied clip doesn't land on the selected lane when pasted, I'm wondering what these behaviors the feature performed in front of me today mean.
 


The screenshot above shows nine MIDI takes I recorded (without using loop) and the numbers indicate the order they were recorded. Why did Sonar have to add the fourth lane (T4) to record Clip #5 when T1 and T2 were available? Same applies to Clip #8. There's no need to create seven lanes to accomodate these clips. Only three would do.
 
Next, I decided to bouce the clips. So I applied the "Bouce to Clip" command to the three groups individually (1-3, 4-6, and 7-9). And the result was this:
 

 
The first merged clip appears on T1, while the second and third merged clips appear on T5. What made them decide to go into these lanes? I have no idea. Also, I tried undo and applying the Bounce to Clip command several times and the resulted clip positions were almost always different, like this:
 

 

Next, I created another project and this time I disabled the "Create New Lanes on Overlap" option in Preferences because I actually want to record all takes in the part on a sigle track/lane. The online help's explanation on this option is "If you have the Expand/collapse Take Lanes button on a track enabled, and you record one clip so that it overlaps another clip, the clips appear in different take lanes when this option is enabled."
 
So I recorded three takes with the Expand/Collapse Take Lanes button enabled, and the screenshot below shows three takes recorded in a single lane. Good.
 

 
Then, if I click the Expand/Collapse Take Lanes button to collapse the lanes and click it again to expand the lanes, surprisingly, I see three lanes there, like this:
 

 
So, what is the point of disabling this "Create New Lanes on Overlap" option?
Also, in the above pic, can you see that the order of clip numbers and lane numbers are different? Why????
 
 
Anyway, what I'd really like to know is if there's a way to record all takes (including overlapped clips) in just one lane WITHOUT enabling the Expand/Collapse Take Lanes button. Can X3 do this?
 
When I record MIDI, I want to use lanes as a place to keep alternative ideas (that's why I don't want muted clips in additional lanes to appear in the main track when the lanes are collapsed).
 
I really don't understand these behaviors. I really don't understand Take Lanes. Am I missing something?
 
Thanks
 

Not yet familiar with take lanes in X3 (I'm coming from X1), but based on your experiment above, I would have expected each take to be in a lane of its own.  Why is take 4 in the same lane with take 3 in your first image?  I actually would have expected more take lanes, not fewer.  How would Sonar know that the take I made 4th should go on the same lane as the take I did 1st (using what I imagine to be your logic)?
 
And out of curiosity, why would you want all of your multiple takes to be in one lane, as you indicated with:

So I recorded three takes with the Expand/Collapse Take Lanes button enabled, and the screenshot below shows three takes recorded in a single lane. Good

 
In that case, why use take lanes at all - just put the record mode to sound on sound and leave it all collapsed.  Right?

Blades
Why is take 4 in the same lane with take 3 in your first image? 

 
I also want to know it. Only the programmer knows, I guess.
 

Blades
And out of curiosity, why would you want all of your multiple takes to be in one lane, as you indicated with:

So I recorded three takes with the Expand/Collapse Take Lanes button enabled, and the screenshot below shows three takes recorded in a single lane. Good

 
Because they belong to the same part, and also because I often delete part of the clips and then record different ideas over them when I'm in the songwriting stage. As you know, Sonar doesn't have the record mode that automatically merges the recorded take into the existing clip, so that users have to bounce the clips each time if they want them merged. It's ideal to have both options, like some of the other daws.
 

Blades
In that case, why use take lanes at all - just put the record mode to sound on sound and leave it all collapsed.  Right?

 
That's exactly what I've been doing since X2, and I always thought all takes I recorded were in a single lane. But I realized I was wrong when I clicked the Expand/Collapse Take Lane button today (that's why I did these experimenets today). If you collapse the lanes and record multiple takes in the same section, X2/X3 assigns the clips to separate lanes (in the background).
 
It's difficult to explain, but I use many linked MIDI clips when I'm in the songwriting stage and today I noticed one linked MIDI clip (because it had the dotted clip outline) that didn't seem to have any shared copy in the project. To find out where the copy or copies are, I right-clicked the clip and selected "Select All Siblings," but I couldn't locate any shared copy in the project. Then, it struck me that the shared copy might be hidden somewhere, and.....I found it in one of the lanes. I don't want this to happen again. It was confusing.

I'd really like Cake to weigh in on this subject, (or if they have, please redirect me).  I do a lot of comping and X2 has been a real pain.  I hear good things about the new comping tools in X3 but apparently not everything has been fixed.
 
Thanks.
 

Standing back, feel quite passionate about how this works from the X2 days so I'll keep my mouth shut ;) Take lanes were a great half baked idea that should have been fixed in X2B.

I think the most comfortable way to internalize this is to imagine that Take Lanes are a new feature, now on Version 2.0 in SONAR X3.
The feature known as "Track Layers" was removed from the product in Version X2. It's not coming back (as far as we know) and the new "Take Lanes" feature has some similarities to it, but it is not meant to be a "better version of Track Layers".
So, there's going to be some friction as you figure out how to alter your workflow to accommodate this feature change.
Sonar won't consolidate take lanes because it is trying to keep the takes separate - by design! If someone says, "hey, you know, the second take had the best feel" it wants to allow you to isolate Take 2 and mute all audio related to other takes.
Anyone whose workflow incorporate multiple short takes of recording (and that would include me) ends up with multiple take lanes that don't make immediate sense. There's some manual arrangement required.
Personally I would like a "consolidate take lanes, ignore recording chronology" command that would merge down to a nice minimum set of take lanes. Maybe we'll get this feature if enough folks request it.

Also, in the above pic, can you see that the order of clip numbers and lane numbers are different?

 
Does it maybe have to do with the length of the clip that the clips re-order? I'm not trying to say it makes sense. It's a difference I noticed and I was thinking about how they have written code to make a composite track out of clips. I'm wondering if as part of their work to discover clips that were recorded last as top priority for display in the main track and then clips that exceed the length of the last recorded clip doesn't cause some strange ordering of the clips when you expand the clips from a single lane.

Regarding the first image, I think takes 3+4 and 6+7 are in the same lanes because the second recording follows the first in time and does not overlap the first. I understand questioning the behavior, but I think this is the reason it doesn't trigger a new lane to be created.

gswitz
Regarding the first image, I think takes 3+4 and 6+7 are in the same lanes because the second recording follows the first in time and does not overlap the first. I understand questioning the behavior, but I think this is the reason it doesn't trigger a new lane to be created.

 
And perhaps the reason it doesn't use T1 to hold recording 4 is because T3 is the active lane at that point in time.

I suppose the logic is that a lane with a clip in it before the recording point might have another clip after, so that it places the clip in a completely new lane to avoid potentially crashing into a clip.
 
Perhaps Sonar should wait to assign the clip to its lane, and then do a simple decision tree after recording stops to determine whether it needs to create a new lane.
 
This is also a case where the old "rebuild lanes" feature would help a bit.