I've been silently taking a lot from this forum (and others) for a while, and I'd like to make a contribution. I just upgraded to Sonar 8.5.3 (from Home Studio 6) and I've spent a few days with my head in the Audiosnap vortex. I've discovered some fundamental design flaws in the software (in my opinion,) and a few bugs as well.
But I've also discovered what I believe to be the best trick to making several tracks groove together in a way that is both tight and natural. The instruction manual does a terrible job of laying this out in a down-to-earth fashion.
 
First, I'll explain what I think are the fundamental design flaws with Audiosnap, and some bugs that I found. I guess I'm posting this because I secretly hope that Brandon and the rest at Cakewalk will see this and be inspired to clean it up Version 9. Also, I think the problems I found will explain why so many people have been frustrated with it.
 
Then I'll share a working method that got the best quantizing results, to my ear (for the type of music I'm doing.)  For simplicity, let's say that I'm simply trying to quantize a hand-played percussion track to a rhythm guitar track. I want the percussion to follow the rhythmic idiosyncracies (ie, "groove") of the guitar track. I have some midi as well, but this is basically performed music, overdubbed one track at a time (not computer music.)
 
The challenge is that when you layer a number of tracks on each other, they don't sound as tight as a group of professional musicians responding to each other live in a room. But if you quantize every track to the time ruler/ metronome, it sounds too mechanical and loses the human touch. So, the challenge is to make these layered tracks groove tightly with each other, but without making the music it sound like a machine.
 
This is what I thought was the fundamental purpose of "Groove Quantize," and this is why I bought Sonar 8.5. It turned out to be A LOT harder than I thought.

DESIGN FLAWS
 
Here are what I believe are some fundamental design flaws with Sonar's Audiosnap/ Quantizing/ Tempo Map tools. I really hope Cakewalk will take notice and fix these.
 
If I am wrong about anything here, please let me know!!!!
 
1) There are too many ways of going about the same thing. Here are the options:
Quantize
Groove Quantize
Quantize to Pool
Extract/ Apply Groove tool
Tempo Mapping
 
It took me hours of reading, and re-reading the online help, and experimenting, to understand the fundamental differences between all these methods. The online help is terribly disorganized, because information about these various approaches is scattered in bits and pieces.
 
2) There seems to be a great deal of redundancy between these different tools. For example, Groove Quantize seems to be fundamentally the same as Quantize to Pool. They both work by analyzing the transients of a given track, and applying that data to a quantized track. The only fundamental difference I can see is that when Groove Quantizing, Sonar stores that data in the Windows clipboard. When Pool Quantizing, Sonar stores that data in something called a "pool." Why have 2 methods of doing the same thing?
 
Next, Quantize to Pool is fundamentally the same thing as Extract/ Apply Groove. They both work by extracting transients to a pool and applying them to a quantized track. The only differences are:
-When you use Extract/ Apply Groove, the pool is automatically cleared after issuing the command.
-Quantize to Pool allows you to layer transients onto the pool from various sources. Extract/ Apply Groove does not.
- Quantize to Pool provides a dialogue whereby you can adjust the strength of the quantize, whereas Extract/ Apply Groove does not.
 
All these nuances are painfully unclear in the manual, and I don't think all this redundancy is needed.
 
3) Controls for these various methods are scattered all about the interface in an illogical manner. For example Quantize and Groove Quantize are available under the Process menu, but Pool Quantize is buried in an obscure location in the right click menu that only becomes available if the Transient Tool is selected. Quantize and Tempo Mapping are available from the AudioSnap palette, but Groove Quantize and Pool Quantize are not. But if you want to use Groove Quantize on an audio track, you first have to open the AudioSnap palette and click a button called "Copy to Midi," which seems totally counter-intuitive.
 
4) When humans play music, there are tiny timing imperfections that create feel in the music. The goal is to quantize in a manner that makes the music tight, but without losing this human touch. When multiple audio tracks are perfectly synced to a time ruler (metronome,) the human element is stripped away from the music, and the result sounds too mechanical. I believe the fundamental purpose of Groove Quantizing/ Pool Quantizing was to address this problem. It works by analyzing the transients of a "master groove" track, and then quantizing other tracks to those transients.
 
But the fundamental flaw is this: In order for any given beat to be groove quantized/ pool quantized, that beat must be provided with a transient in the master groove track. Otherwise, the quantized beat has nothing to snap to. But what happens if the source groove track has no transient on that particular beat?
 
Example:
Let's say we have a rhythm guitar clip with an awesome, behind-the-beat groove to it. A percussionist recorded his track too ahead of the beat. COMMON problem. We want to quantize the percussion clip, to the groove of the rhythm guitar clip.
 
For simplicity, let's say the rhythm guitar clip has 2 transients: A downbeat strum, and a backbeat strum. The percussion clip also has 2 transients, but they are both on the downbeat.
 
If you extract the groove/ pool from the rhythm guitar clip and apply that to the percussion clip, then the first beat of the percussion track will adjust into alignment with the guitar clip. The reason is that these are both downbeats, roughly at the same place.
 
But the second percussion beat will not quantize to the guitar, because that was a downbeat, and there was no corresponding downbeat on the guitar clip to quantize to. The result is that the beats in the percussion track have adjusted disproportionately to one another. If the percussion track was off time pretty badly, then the quantized percussion will sound terrible.
 
To present an extreme case, how would you quantize a bassline that is played on all downbeats, to a rhythm guitar track that is played on all backbeats? You can't. There goes raggae!
 
5) To fix this problem, Sonar offers what is called "Add MBT to pool." The idea is to steal metronomic beats off the Time Ruler and add these to the pool. You can select whether to take 16th beats, or quarter beats, and so on. This is supposed to fill in the missing markers for our backbeats.
 
But the problem with this feature is that it adds pool markers for ALL beats, not just the ones for which a transient marker was missing. So on each beat that the musician played a note, you'll have TWO pool markers right next to each other: The one played by the musician (which represents the right "feel" of the groove,) and the one taken off the time ruler.
 
Let's return to our earlier example, the rhythm guitar track has a great, behind-the-beat groove to it. But the poor percussionist always plays ahead of the beat. The MBT pool marker will come right before the strum marker. Then the percussion transient, which was early, will be quantized to the MBT marker, rather than the guitarist's strum. The guitarist's "behind-the beat" groove is not captured. This completely defeats the whole purpose of groove quantizing in the first place. And this is a very real-world situation.
 
Even if the problem of doubled markers was resolved, this method still would be flawed, because all the downbeats of this percussion track would have a  "behind-the-beat" groove, while all backbeats would be played precisely on the metronome, which makes no sense.

BUGS AND ANNOYANCES
 
Here are some aggravating bugs and annoyances with AudioSnap.
 
1) You have spent 2 hours painfully, tediously adjusting, adding, and disabling transient markers on your audio. Then all the sudden, it looks like all that work is screwed up. The markers are not how you left them. WHAT HAPPENED??!  I must have adjusted the transient markers for a percussion track 6 times before I tried to figure out what was going on.

There are some moves in Sonar that will make you LOSE your work on transient editing, and the help manual doesn't tell you! This may help explain why there are a lot of very frustrated people on the forum. Here's what I found:
 
a. If you disable any transients, then click on the Select Tool, then you reselect the Transient Tool, then all your work disabling those transients will be lost, UNLESS you promote them BEFORE clicking on the Select Tool. 
 
According to the help manual, promoting transients is supposed to protect them against changes to the threshold slider, but it does not tell you that your work is pretty much guaranteed to be lost, unless you promote them. You must promote disabled markers before simply returning to standard audio editing.
 
b. The same is true if you select "Disable Audiosnap on Selected Clips" in the Audiosnap palette.
 
c. If you go to Edit a Tempo Map, and you change the values for either "Average Tempo" or "Beats per Measure," then ALL YOUR WORK editing any transients in that clip will be immediately lost. This is pretty horrific because that work can take hours, and it's about as fun as mowing a lawn with a pair of tweezers.
-All moved transients will be reset to their original location.
-All stretched transients will be reset to their original location.
-All disabled transients will be re-enabled per the threshold slider setting.
-All user added transients will be deleted.
-All your adjustments to your temp map will also be lost.
 
All this will happen, regardless of whether you promoted those transients, or not! Pretty bad.  I know there is some incredible programming genius behind Audiosnap, but this seems like a massive oversight. This is the software programming equivalent of changing your page layout in Microsoft Word, only to find that suddenly your last 2 hours of edits disappear. And there are no warnings.
 
So it is critical to set your tempo and beats (if needed) BEFORE you begin your transient editing work.
 
d. If you "Bounce to Clip," you also screw up your transient edits:
-Some new transient markers may be added in arbitrary locations, where none existed before. Oddly, they appear as "user inserted" markers, even though you didn't insert them.
-Meanwhile, user added transient markers are deleted.
-All moved transients are reset to their original location.
-Further, I have found that if you bounce a clip that was a bit off tempo, then you may not be able to set the "Average Tempo" to the project's tempo value under "Edit Tempo Map." Every time you select the project tempo, your input will be immediately overwritten by some other value.
 
Bottom line- avoid bouncing clips. This is a Catch-22 though, because when a clip gets bugged, a favorite way to address the bug is to bounce the clip.
 
2) When adjusting a tempo map, which you intend to use for setting a project tempo (see below,) all beat markers that you want to use for defining the tempo MUST BE "ANCHORED" (RED) in order to work. In my opinion, this is ridiculous. In the online help, red (or "anchored") beat markers are simply described as ones that have been moved by the user. But I found that if a whole note beat marker is not anchored, the project time ruler will not snap to that beat marker. This is very tedious, because even if a beat marker is in the right place, you have to manually move it off/  then back on/ its transient in order to "anchor" it, one by one. Cakewalk really needs to address this.
 
3) Here are some bugs I have found.
 
a. Suddenly, you can't see any of the transient markers unless you zoom way, way out. Almost zoomed entirely out. To address this, you have to bounce the clip, but then you'll loose all your transient edits, as explained above.
 
b. Sometimes, the waveform display looks like a flat line (silence,) even though audio is present. This can happen for a whole clip, or only part of a clip. 
 
c. I have had a tempo map go corrupt. You'll know it happens because the beat markers go totally haywire- measure 30 comes before measure 19, beat markers are missing labels, they are scattered in a non-rhythmic fashion. When this happened to me, I didn't hear any problems unless I tried to export/ bounce to clip/ bounce to track/ freeze. As soon as you do any of these things, the track's rhythm will go off. In other words, if this happens, you will never get your audio OUT of Sonar without the timing sounding messed up. Start the track over, or hold a tape recorder up to your speakers;)

SOLUTION TO GROOVE QUANTIZING: ALIGN TIME RULER TO CLIP
 
The solution I found for groove quantizing audio is not to use groove quantize at all. (Or pool quantize.)  The answer is in tempo mapping. The documentation for this feature is so poor that I had to read it some 10 times over 2 days, and set up a series of test files, before I finally "got it."
 
The reason why tempo mapping is so great, is that it stretches the timing of all beats within a measure proportionately, whether those beats happened to fall on a groove's transient or not. I am getting awesome results with this. It works by automatically assigning a slightly different tempo to each measure of the groove track. The project time ruler is then adjusted to fit that tempo, and all other tracks can be Quantized to that time ruler (using regular Quantize,) using any level of resolution needed. Then your quantizing will sound "human" rather than mechanical.
 
Here's how it works:
 
1) For all your audio tracks, right click to "Edit Tempo Map" and set whatever Average Tempo and Number of Beats values you want in those fields. You must do this first because if you do it later, you'll lose all your transient edits (as explained above.)
 
2) Choose which track you want to use for defining the groove for all other tracks. It should have a great rhythmic feel and it should be fairly accurate. I'll call this the "groove source" track. (I'm assuming the entire track is just one clip. You can safely bounce to clips before doing any time stretching.) First, let's quantize your groove source track to the time ruler just a little bit, to make sure it has fairly good rhythm.  If your groove source track is audio, then you need to set the transients. Use only a half note or a whole note of resolution. Why? Because if 2 transients are too close to one another, the result can sound unnatural or forced if they are stretched too much. Let the stretching occur proportionally over 2 or 4 beats.

What this means is, just lock in 1 or 2 key transients per measure, maximum. And this is critical: The transients you choose must fall on either the 1, 2, 3, or 4 downbeat of the measure. That's because you'll need to anchor beatmarkers to them later. Don't bother with any 8th note backbeat transients, you don't need them. Play with the threshold and resolution in Audiosnap to get you close to this result, then disable/ adjust from there.
 
3) Check the transients, because occasionally Sonar throws them off arbitrarily. Disable or adjust transients that are off.
 
4) Promote all the transients so that your disabled ones won't be re-enabled against your will (see above.)
 
5) Quantize your groove source track to the Time Ruler. Don't overdo it- I like a strength of 50% (assuming your player started out with good rhythm.) Remember you don't want to squash all the humanity out of it. Choose the smallest value of beat that you have in your track (I find that 16th beat is the smallest you can go in a human-played track. You may get better results with larger values, like 8th or quarter notes. If you choose 16th beats, you risk certain 8th notes going off to a 16th beat, etc. Experiment.) 
 
6) You'll have to listen to the quantized material for any notes that were quantized to the wrong direction. I typically undo the quantize, streatch that particular note so that it will fall within the range of your beat resolution, then re-quantize.

7) While still in the Transient Tool, right click the groove source track and select Edit Tempo Map.
 
8) Now you'll need to adjust the beat markers. This takes a tremendous amount of patience. The beat markers can get off, so you have to go trough the whole track, zoomed in pretty close. Try locking in the beginning and end of the track first. Then the rest of the markers will fall into line pretty close.

CRITICAL: The beat markers MUST BE "ANCHORED" (RED) in order to affect the time ruler. (I mentioned this complaint above.) So every measure needs at least one beat marker that is anchored to a transient. I have found this is all you need. Again, the beauty of this method is that all other beats in the measure will adjust proportionally. (Obviously, if there are any erratic beats in your groove source track, you probably shouldn't have chosen this track as your groove source in the first place.)

As you are doing this, realize that your other tracks will eventually be quantized according to this tempo map.
 
You may occasionally need to manually add a transient to snap a beat marker to, if there wasn't a good one to anchor to. (For example, if a whole section is 8th note backbeats.)  Turn on the measure gridlines, it will make them easier to see.
 
9) Repeat all the above steps for the tracks you want to quantize (applies only to audio tracks) . Midi tracks can be quantized too, but you don't have to mess with the transients etc.
 
10) Under clip properties, make sure that the time base for all clips in your project are set to Musical Time.
 
11) Select your groove source track, and in the AudioSnap palette, click "Project tempo follows clip." Choose "Beat" as the resolution. (We assume your source track has no erratic beats at this point, because you quantized it earlier to the time ruler.) The project tempo is changed to follow the groove source track. Click around- you will notice that your project tempo changes slightly with each measure, reflecting the slight timing nuances of the performance. Amazing.
 
12) Because the time ruler is now adjusted to match the timing nuances of your groove source track, all other tracks may simply be quantized to the time ruler. Select any clip or track you want to quantize, then select Process > Quantize (NOT groove quantize.) 
 
I find that a quantize of 60-70% sounds most natural. Remember that it would be impossible for a drummer to have 100% matched every little rhythm idiosyncracy of the guitarist, etc. This is why I'd never choose 100% strength- it sounds a bit unnatural, it would be impossible to do.
 
All beats of your quantized track will be quantized to the groove source track. And here is the clincher: Smaller beats (like 16th beats) will not be ignored: They will automatically be interpolated proportionately between the other beats! This is the critical benefit that Pool & Groove Quantizing are missing.
 
13) Again, you'll need to methodically check the quantize results to make sure that nothing got stretched to the wrong beat.

14) I'm brand new at this so if other people have other methods or can point out any errors here, please weigh in!
 
Good luck!

I think I might be in love with you. This Audiosnap critical look is excellent.

I've never used Audiosnap but if I do I'm going to read this thread a couple of times first and keep it open while I work. Thanks for posting this valuable resource of information.

This is a great posting. It definitely reflects similar experiences and observations I've had trying to use audiosnap.

I also agree with your conclusion that set project tempo from clip is key functionality in trying to work with varying human generated tempos. 

Our user community needs to encourage Cakewalk to continue to improve audiosnap. I'm worried that after all the improvements that happened in the last couple of versions, Cakewalk will take break from evolving this technology. This would leave us with, as your report shows, functionality with great potential, but very difficult or impossible to use because of bugs and poor UI design.

I'd suggest you send your report to Cakewalk's CTO directly. While I can imagine cakewalk gets lots of comments about problems, your report is important because you discuss how a collection of functions interact.

I think Sonar would be able to distinguish itself from its competition by creating great tempo management tools. You are correct that its very difficult to simulate the feel of musicians in a room playing live using existing tempo tools. I can imagine future versions of Sonar having a "master tempo" track and tempo tracks for each individual track. The tempo controls for a track would have graphical handles so that you could drag measure bar locations to desired locations, etc. Furthermore, you should be able to identify sections of a track and be able to adjust how much the section is behind or ahead of the master tempo, with the transitions at the entry and exit point being smoothed. Anyway, I could go on....

Again, great posting.

regards,
Gord

I think Sonar would be able to distinguish itself from its competition by creating great tempo management tools.

I agree. I can imagine consolidating the jumble, and bringing everything into a single dialogue that permits all this to happen in a far more intuitive way, in an organized sequence of steps. Right now, it's like the tools are there, but there's not enough clarity on how they should be used, and in what order. So the user is left to figure out the maze.

I think this is a common problem in software development. Sections of code are added on as more features are added, from one release to the next. But then at some point, the design of the whole no longer makes any sense, and the developer has a difficult choice to make: Do we clean up the jumbled mess that is already there, or do we just keep layering on more features?  I think Sonar might be there right now. If Version 9 cleaned this up without adding a single new feature, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat:)

I can imagine future versions of Sonar having a "master tempo" track and tempo tracks for each individual track. The tempo controls for a track would have graphical handles so that you could drag measure bar locations to desired locations, etc. Furthermore, you should be able to identify sections of a track and be able to adjust how much the section is behind or ahead of the master tempo, with the transitions at the entry and exit point being smoothed.

And you thought Audiosnap was complicated... 


I'm not too worried about ever having to learn or explain this feature to anyone, though, as it makes absolutely no sense for the most part, and will never be implemented... except for the parts that already have been, like the ability to "adjust how much a section is behind or ahead of the master tempo".


To Big Lion: Yes, a good, comprehensive, thoughtful post. Nice work. When you send it to Cakewalk, don't forget to mention that even when you get the clip map and beat markers perfectly massaged, SONAR may miscalculate the tempos for some intervals needed to align the project to the clip. I tried to file a problem report on this a while back, but the form submission barfed, and I didn't feel like re-entering the whole mess. 


The one I filed about its inability to handle clips with pick-up notes on the last eighth of a measure made it successfully into the black hole, however. 


And, yes, I did get up on the wrong side of bed today... because there was dog crap on the floor on my side.

ight now, it's like the tools are there, but there's not enough clarity on how they should be used, and in what order. So the user is left to figure out the maze.

I agree with this to some extent, but different users also have many different goals in different situations, and the apparent overlap of tools and functions sometimes gives a shorter path to achieving each of those goals by one route or another. For example the difference between Groove Quantize, which is meant to allow quantizing to a saved or imported groove pattern, vs. Quantize to Pool, which is meant to allow quick and selective quantizing of one track to another already in the project. Also there are circumstances where it makes sense to do either of these, even when the overall project is already well-aligned with timeline. If you consider all the different ways you might want to modify the timing of a project with reference to both MIDI and audio, I don't think there's really that much redundancy in the design.


I also think there's a limit to how intuitive you can make these functions. Understanding all the complexities of musical time's relationship to absolute time, and how it's represented in SONAR's timeline (where M:B:T intervals are fixed, and absolute time is malleable) is inherently challenging. A lot of what confuses users about Audiosnap boils down to a basic misunderstanding of these relationships, and/or failure too put the time and energy into understanding it all that you have. There's no royal road to learning some of this stuff.