I apologize in advance for the following long and complicated post.
 
Some may have been watching me squirm around as I tried to figure out what to do with an old live recording session that needs to be tempo corrected.
 
To recap...
 
I've got 9 tracks. Kick, snare, overheads, bass, guitars and vocals. All recorded live in a "studio". I want to use as much of these tracks in the final product as possible and they are all mostly usable. I will be doing some overdubs but these takes will be the foundation of the project. It is multiple songs with at least two takes of each song in their entirety.
 
The problem (the current one anyway)...
 
Massively fluctuating tempo. These song are meant to change tempo at certain points but not the way they currently are. I want to get them to follow a general tempo then do finer corrections on the drums and then the rest of the parts to tighten it all up.
 
I've learned how to use audiosnap for drum correction but I need to get the other tracks (guitar, bass, vocals) to follow them and because of the WILD fluctuations it's not just a matter of dragging a couple transients around. I've also figured out how to set the audiosnap algorithms for each track independently so that's not an issue (so far).
 
What I'm trying to figure out is the best way to do this. Should I look at my tempo maps (which I've made by manually adjusting the time line to match up to the songs) and make approximations as to what the tempos should be, create a tempo map based on that, then use audiosnap to manually pull everything into time? I'd have to create anchor points across all the tracks to keep the phase relationships of the drums and keep the rest of tracks in sync.
 
If I did it this way I'd still have to make the subtle timing corrections so should I render the general time correction then adjust those rendered tracks or do the general corrections AND the finite corrections in one render? That final option would take a long time and I'm not sure if Sonar will save in the middle of such a transient muck around and with the first option I'm not sure if the double rendering will cause a ton of artifacts.
 
The other way I was thinking this might work is enabling groove clip and inserting transient markers at specific measures then just apply a new tempo map making everything just snap into place but considering how crazy these tracks are I could see that turning into a real mess. Also I would definitely have to do a double render (one for the general correction then the finer correction).
 
So there it is. I know this can be done... I'm just not sure exactly how I should proceed. I will be experimenting with this one way or the other but if anyone can point me in the right direction it would be appreciated.
 
Thanks.

Without knowing the project and exactly what you want to achieve it's hard to know what is best so I'll offer up a suggestion.
 
The first thing I'd do is a fresh "save as" so if it all goes awry you can get back to where you started from.
 
Then just to annoy you, I'd suggest you forget the tempo map you've extracted if you don't want to continue following that.
 
Then I'd decide where the tempo changes that you want to happen (i.e. the planned ones) take place. I'd then split and trim at those points and bounce to clip and insert the correct tempo at those points. From this point I treat each section independently
 
I would then start to tidy up any timing issues in each section either manually or using quantise although there might be some trial and error with settings depending on the original material. If quantising drums though use the split clips at beats option, you want to move not stretch them.
 
That might be perfectly acceptable once you've done that but there are other options available such as clip follows project.
 
Remember that there is only so much audiosnap can achieve with success and pinpoint accuracy to the project tempo map is only going to be important if you are going to be adding MIDI tracks to the project or want perfect timing accuracy with time based FX.
 
HTH but it's hard to offer definitive advice without knowing the material or your final goal. Most of my stuff is just tidying up live band recordings rather than setting it all to a really accurate tempo map. i.e. I usually leave most of the tempo drift there but it's not normally too bad anyway.

That's great, Karl. I'll be poking around with all that to see what I can get going. I don't think quantize is gonna work though due to the chaotic nature of the tracks but the other advice seems solid.
 
And basically the objective is to take the entire set of tracks and get them to approximately follow an even tempo (don't want to lose the feel). What's happening now is after certain changes I'm going from say 160 BPM to 180. I'd like to find some kind of middle ground. On top of that there are moments where there are big fills or stops that lag making things go out of whack (like during the fill the tempo of that measure drops by 20 or so BPM). I just want to get things a little more even and create a grid to do finer corrections like lining up the kick/snare to downbeats and have the other instruments follow those changes. It's going to definitely be a lot of work but I think I can do it and it should be worth it.
 
Thanks, dude.

Just a little update. I started trying some stuff yesterday. Enabling groove clip completely screwed up the clips. I'm not sure what I did wrong (might take a closer look today) but it crammed a few minutes of material into under a minute. If I tried to stretch out the clip it just added another loop. I know why it's doing that last part... just not sure how to get it to stretch. I'll figure it out though but I'm not sure that's really the way I should be going about things.
 
So I decided to try doing it all manually one row of transients at a time (double clicking one to select the row and adding the transients that got missed. I can't expand the window thingie because the song is too fast and it would snag the wrong transients if I did).
 
Trying to do this across all of the tracks starting with the drums and including the guitars, bass and vox was definitely not working. The the guit, bass, vox transients just were consistent with the drums (for obvious reasons) so I've decided to leave those alone for now and just get the drums fixed then try to go back and match up the rest after the fact. Not sure how well that's gonna work out and it's going to take forever. I just wish I knew of a way to have the main transient being moved hooked into the exact same point as those other tracks so they move together.
 
All the meticulous mapping I did was definitely worthwhile even if I'm not using that map for anything other than reference. It does however give me visual cues as to problem areas and I can look at the most steady portion of the song and set the new project tempo to that. Now I'm dragging the transients into line with the new tempo. It seems to be working but I started with the easiest song.
 
For some reason I thought that if I set beat one of a measure then moved beat one of the next measure all the transients in between would readjust themselves but they just stay in place. I'm sure if there is a setting to change this but I tried the different online render options with no luck. My solution has been to just lasso all the transients in between and drag them where they need to be. Then I do some finer adjustments if necessary.
 
So for the simpler stuff this method seems to be working but I'm not sure how well it's going to deal with the crazier stuff. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
 
If anyone has any additional thoughts on this matter I'm all ears. Thanks.

A ha! I forgot about the Timing Tool. Maybe I can do some tweaks I need done with that. We'll see.
 
aaand Alt + Click to insert transients. If that works then I should be able to do things as I originally wanted to which is insert markers across all the tracks at important measures and move everything into place all at once.
 
I should have checked my notes first. Lots of gold in there. I've just been fiddling with theory for so long I must have pushed out a lot of the knowledge I acquired over the winter. D'oh.

Beepster,
 
I haven't tried this yet, but you might consider it...
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Free-SONARCompatible-Tempo-Map-Creator-Available-m2832233.aspx#2832864
 
It's a free tool. The idea is that you create you tempo map midi track and export it. Then, apply this program to the track. Import the track to another project. Then past the tempo from the imported project over your current project. That way, you tempo doesn't jump up and down but adjusts smoothly with the band.

Thanks, gswitz. I saw that the other day but didn't click through to study it more. It is definitely cool but I don't think it's made for what I'm attempting. I'm actually trying to eliminate some of "humanness" of the tracks because the humans (myself included) screwed it right up. Also it's audio where that seems to be more for humanizing midi. I still would have a use for it at some point but not for this project. I may be overlooking something though. I guess it might have helped me create the initial reference tempo maps but those are done now. I didn't find doing those all that hard either. Just very time consuming. I think I may have solved a few of my major roadblocks. Now it's a matter of a) seeing if the features will work as intended and b) whether the render algos will make the changes without borking up the audio. It's gonna be a big day here in Beepsterland. Cheers.

Well, if I understand it, it creates a slurred tempo map. In other words, the tempo changes by degrees rather than jumps as it would in a human performance. So, the tempo map produced by this might be much closer to the actual tempo changes in the performance. Then, when you apply tempo changes in the algs, it might correct them more naturally.
 
I may be wrong on this. It's a bit of a guess as I haven't done it, but my understanding is that the developer had your current needs in mind when he developed it. It's useful either for enabling fx to track to the tempo changes better or for removing the tempo changes themselves.

Definitely requires a closer look. I'm still trying to connect the proverbial dots of this entire procedure/concept. I'm finding doing everything manually and using my ears does seem to be getting me what I want but some way to have at least some of the more repetitive and mundane steps would be nice. Cheers.

Okay. Here's the new plan.
 
1) Clone all tracks. This set of clones is going to be the ones I do my bulk time adjustment on.
 
2) Set all tracks to Audio Transients and turn the threshold up to 100% to get rid of ALL transient markers. I do not want to use the ones that have been auto detected.
 
3) Using Alt + Click I'm going to insert transients at the measures following the tempo map I created. Because inserting Transient Markers does not seem to follow the Snap Grid I'll have to move them manually. If I grab the lines or "handles" at the top or bottom of the markers it stretches the audio so I have to grab them from the diamond in the middle which does not stretch the audio. This will snap the marker to the measure. Not sure if I'll do this for each measure or just where there are problems. I'll have to see how the stretching works out.
 
4) Once I have all the transient markers in place I'll change the tempo using the Insert Tempo dialog.
 
5) I'll drag the markers into time with the new tempo and render each clip with with whatever algo gets the best result for that track.
 
I may or may not do my more finite adjustments before the render to avoid double rendering but I'll try it this way first and see how it works.
 
I think this makes sense and will report back with the results.