overdub
But if you wouldn't mind outlining the steps for me, I'd sure appreciate it. I may just take a little time and do some experimenting with it myself. I usually learn things better when I have to dig for the answers or solutions.
Okay; you asked for it.
The following is from an earlier post with some updates and parenthetical notes that might apply to your case. The way I do this is always evolving in small ways to accommodate different situations, but this is still generally applicable. Note that this was originally aimed at aligning a project to a single imported MIDI clip but the tabbing to transients in an audio track works pretty much like tabbing to MIDI events, and it's not necessary to show transient markers in order for the tab function to work.
The main thing to understand is that Set Measure/Beat At Now is basically telling SONAR to set the previous tempo to make the specified Measure and Beat of the timeline fall on the
absolute time at the current Now cursor location: the playback of audio is not affected, and MIDI event start times and durations are adjusted automatically so that they also play back with the same timing rather than following the tempo changes. You're effectively stretching/compressing the timeline to fit the existing playback timing.
1. Drag the clip to align the first event wherever it should be in the timeline.
2. If that time is not 1:01:000, use Set Measure/Beat At Now (Shift+M) to "pin" that first beat so that becomes the reference point for determining tempo.
3. Count out several measures listening to the clip (or go to the last event if the clip is short) set the Now time at the beginning of that event by tabbing to it, and use Shift+M again to set the correct measure and beat in the timeline to the absolute time of that event (i.e. "Now".
4.SONAR will alter the tempo at the first point you pinned to make the timeline match the clip without altering the playback timing of the clip (or any other clip in the project), and add a like tempo value at the beat you set as a refererence for setting subsequent beats.
5. If the clip was recorded to a click, and/or was quantized, that may be all you need to do; if not, you can set additional beats every few measures or every measure, or even within measures or beats (note that fractional beats are entered as decimal values not ticks, so 02:480 is 02.500).
6. If the clip didn't start at 1:01:000, go to the tempo view, and change the tempo at 1:01:000 to match the first tempo SONAR inserted (this gets trickier in a project with mixed MIDI and audio and where audio doesn't start at 1:01:000.
That's about it. For a very long clip, I recommend setting the first point at 8 measures or so to see what beat the last event should fall on. Then undo the 8-measure set point, and set that last event to establish an overall average tempo, and roughly align the whole clip so that it's easy to see what beats other events should fall on in the middle of the clip, and decided how many you need to snap to tighten up the timeline match. Setting the first 8 measures is just an interim step to figure out how long the clip is without listening and counting 100+ measures or whatever it is.
See.. easier done than said.
You might actually find that a single tempo precisely matching the original drum machine tempo and starting at 1:01:000 does the trick, rendering all this extra detail superfluous.
Cheers,
Dave