Record without metronome, quantize later

Those are interesting ideas.
I also feel the metronome stifles.
Would a basic bass & drum track instead work for you?
I prefer it as it adds to the feel so I often get the groove going on my drum machine.
The drum machine has the option of changing tempo real time if I want it to speed and slow 1 or 2 bpms intentionally as I record it.
Of course a quick and dirty way is you can also change the metronome clicks to snare and kick in sonar.

I have an older Cakewalk project on which I used an analog drum machine, which was ok for what it did...but now I want to revive the track with better drum sounds and various midi parts. Of course, there's no way I'd be able to set the tempo in SONAR X3 to match the drum machine tempo exactly, so I'm very interested in this thread and hope to come up with a practical approach for aligning the old tracks to a midi grid...or vice-versa.  I've never used 'fit to improv' or tried to snap a grid to a set of beats but I guess there's no better time to learn how than right now.
The good news is that the tempo on my old tracks doesn't vary to any perceptible degree, so this should be a simple task, right?  Oh, where to begin.... 

mike_mccue
Another option:
 
http://www.soundbytesmag....po-thelastdawfrontier/

I can't really see how that's any different from creating a separate project in which you use play in a reference track and use Fit Improvisation to generate a tempo map that you then paste into another project. You might as well just use Fit Improvisation in place. The only real improvement might be the option of having more than four tempo changes measure.

brundlefly

overdub
I have an older Cakewalk project on which I used an analog drum machine, which was ok for what it did...but now I want to revive the track with better drum sounds and various midi parts.

Hey Dub, it looks like you don't have PM enabled. If you enable it, I'll send you my e-mail address, and you can send me the drum track(s) or even the whole project and I'll take a look. Should be easy, but probably easier for me to just do it and then tell you how I did it, rather than try to walk you through the steps without knowing exactly what you're working with. Could be an opportunity to try out Gobbler while we're at it.  

Hey brundlefly...thanks for your kind offer to help out.  I haven't set up Gobbler on my DAW yet . Besides, I'm not too keen on exposing the DAW to the internet any more than is really necessary.  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.  If I can't get it done on my own, however, I'll probably bug you to do it anyway.  The project has taken a back seat for several years because of so many other priorities.
Thanks again for offering a hand...I do appreciate it.  What's your name?
Yea, I don't do PM as a rule.  That kind of stuff can clog up my laptop in no time.  I'll give you my public email address tho, no problem:  dubover1 at yahoo dot com
Happy Halloween!  Be careful tonight......Mmmwwwwaaahhhhhhh   ha ha ha ha !!!! 
 

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

Sounds good, Dub. I enjoy messing around with the tools so I've actually spent more time getting to know Audiosnap than I really needed to given that most of my music originates as MIDI recordings. But it's always good to put in some time experimenting with the tools so you're not flailing around when you *do* need to use them "in anger".
 
As far as Melodyne goes, my initial impression is that Audiosnap is at least as good, and possibly better at locating transients, and it offers many tools for working with transient marker locations, including the tab-to-transient function so I would tend to prefer it over Melodyne for this task. But I'm sure some of that preference has to do with my familiarity with it.