Big Lion

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...

yup, I work in the software development and user interface design and thats the problem.  cakewalk really needs to revisit all the audiosnap functionality, redesign and streamline. Sure they could always fix a few of nasty bugs that make some workflows impossible but that still leaves them with a very fragile user experience. I was think that if I'm having trouble using audio snap--someone who has pretty good understanding of software and interface design, I'm not surprised that others try it and give up.

Brundlefly mentioned that a flexible tempo maps for each track would be too complicated. I agree, no sense making it if its going to be too complicated. However, that does not have to be the case and I can imagine a good user interface designer making this pretty simple to use. I'm not sure we really need this but I am sure that audiosnap isn't anywhere near its potential.

cheers,
Gord

Yes, very well thought out and possibly indicates that the designers and implementers of audiosnap confused themselves along the way.

Some points though:

Why have 2 methods of doing the same thing?(from post #2)

They aren't the same thing. Quantize to groove to me means taking a rhythm scheme essentially from a midi or midi-like specification. Grooves can be created from midi and saved as "grooves". That idea predates audiosnap as far as I can remember. That would be one reason for having the groove items on the menu bar. The audiosnap pool is integrated with grooves mainly by two ways:
1.converting the pool transients into midi and then saving that as a groove, or
2. using a groove as a source for quantizing audio. 

Quantizing from the pool skips the step of saving the pool as a groove. But quantizing from a groove requires either selecting a groove from the saved grooves or creating a groove by way of a midi sequence which by the way could be generated from the pool.

To me, the pool is a nebulous and, well, "transient" collection of transients, whereas a midi track is a much more clearly visible representation of a pattern. Some of the difficulties of editing and preserving transients in the pool would be much more easily managed by putting them on a midi track and editing them there and maybe even permanently saving them in a "groove". But maybe only because the existing implementation of the pool is hard to work and buggy.

-Quantize to Pool allows you to layer transients onto the pool from various sources.

Did you mean that Quantize to Pool layers the transients? I didn't think so. Or did you mean that the Pool is an aggregate of the layered transients from various sources. Which can then be used to quantize.

Anyway, it might be useful to keep in mind that the task of layering a rhythm that is not completely represented by any one audio or midi track is complex by nature. You want some beats, but not all, from one track and you want other beats, but not all, from another track.

It seems that a midi track might be an easier venue in the current implementation for constructing a rhythmic pattern. Many things that are difficult or buggy with the pool can be done maybe easier on a midi track. Then the midi track can be used as a "groove" for quantizing.

Bill B

reposting to fix formatting...
 
 

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

Big Lion

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...

yup, I work in the software development and user interface design and thats the problem.  cakewalk really needs to revisit all the audiosnap functionality, redesign and streamline. Sure they could always fix a few of nasty bugs that make some workflows impossible but that still leaves them with a very fragile user experience. I always think that if I'm having trouble using audio snap--someone who has pretty good understanding of software and interface design, I'm not surprised that others try it and give up.
 
Brundlefly mentioned that a flexible tempo maps for each track would be too complicated. I agree, no sense making it if its going to be too complicated. However, that does not have to be the case and I can imagine a good user interface designer making this pretty simple to use. I'm not sure we really need this but I am sure that audiosnap isn't anywhere near its potential.
 
cheers,
Gord

Could you explain how your process in post #4 preserves the finer-grained timings? Seems like you might have meant that "all other beats in the measure will adjust proportionally" implies something that could align the finer grained transients, but I don't see how.

I see how using "quantize" (not quantize to pool or groove) would align the major beats that were used to derive the tempo map, but I don't see how the finer grained timing is applied. Or maybe it is good enough to let the finer grained timing of the different instruments to not be aligned with one another.

One more thing about grooves. When applying a groove (including a groove derived from the pool) to a midi track, the relative intensity of each transient can be mapped into velocity in the hits being quantized, thereby transferring not just the timing part of the rhythm but the emphasis of the individual hits as well. This is another way that the whole "groove" notion differs from quantizing audio, since there is no attempt to apply an emphasis pattern to an audio track.

Bill B

Thanks Big Lion for posting this info. I will look over it and see what I can glean from it. Thanks for the hard work.

Seems like you might have meant that "all other beats in the measure will adjust proportionally" implies something that could align the finer grained transients, but I don't see how.

All he's saying is that aligning the timeline to the audio clip beats with a tempo map means that beats between tempo changes are proportionally spaced, so you can quantize to any lower resolution, and SONAR knows where that point is in the measure. Whereas with Groove Quantize or Quantize to Pool, SONAR can only move events to/toward the nearest beat in the pattern.

Thanks for making me feel like I wasn't the only one being able to not grasp AudioSnap 2.0! Lets hope it gets cleaned up for the everyday folks. It's a frustrating program for sure.

   I also have been silently learning from this forum, but I've spent many hours trying to learn audiosnap 2.0 have some things to add.  My only use for audiosnap so far is to match tracks I record and tracks made from loops to drum tracks composed with PGMusic's RealDrums.    I basically only use Quantize to Pool or it's equivalent extract/apply groove, or I manually line up transient markers in the new tracks to drum transients.  This is after I spend a lot of time disabling and adding transient markers.  The Threshold and resolution filters get me most of the way there, but I usually have to edit markers to fine tune it.    The one thing that hung me up the most was an instruction in the Sonar Reference Manual on page 407:
   "Until your project is mixed and finalized, it is recommended that you use the Freeze function instead of Bounce to Tracks(s) or Bounce to Clips(s) if you need to temporarily off-load CPU processing power. "
   I did this on several songs I was recording thinking I could come back and fine-tune audiosnap markers later.  That was unfortunately wrong.  When I opened up most of these songs at the later time, tracks were missing transient markers and waveform displays on sections of the tracks but not others.  I had some copies of these tracks that I had cloned from sitting in an archived folder, so I had to go back to re-do the audiosnap work.  There were some tracks that were not backed up this way, so I had to salvage them by resetting the transient markers the best I could, bounce to clip, and start over.  After the 2nd pass of audiosnap, I carefully saved the work using bounce to clip, making sure I was totally satisfied before locking it in and moving on to the next track. 
   I don't know if I was doing something wrong, but I don't trust Sonar to save audiosnap markers.  I don't hit the save button until I completely finish working on a track, bounce to clip, and turn off the display of markers on that clip.

-- Jim

If you ask me, the fixes they made in Audiosnap 2.0 are great for simple things. Clip quantizing and simple bits for short pieces of audio.

Where I get all sorts of befuddled is when trying to map a whole song, or do something with audio that has a non-metric intro. The clip map looks cool, and it kinda functions alright, but it very easily trips itself up and sticks you with the dreaded "outside of tempo range" error. There's no way to just bash through that. Alternately, there's not an easy way to "rough in" a tempo map and go back for finer details that easily.

I suppose you could comb through the audio first with the transient tool and just get the whole and half transients in place and THEN go through and map it. But geez it's two long passes through the song and all the "lose your work" pitfalls await you.

Plus there's something still a little clumsy about the whole process. I saw a vid of Logic's way of doing it (which looks the best of breed if you ask me) and it's frickin' gorgeous workflow.  

Oh well, hopefully in a short bit we'll know what's coming next version.

Maybe its just me but I can very rarely move any audio without getting ugly artifacts.  I can quantize a bass clip with the same exact settings 2 times, bounce it down..sometimes I will have ugly sounding atifacts sometimes I will not.

Anyhow, thank you Big Lion for posting this info, I will keep around for future info should I someday be able to stretch audio in Audio Snap without getting really ugly noises.

-Mike