There is a small program that you can download for free that helps you determine tempo by tapping the spacebar. What I do is to hum the song in my head, and tap the spacebar to get the tempo, then add a basic drum beat that I can play (my guitar) to.

I thought that Sonar had something like that built-in already...Home Studio 2002 does I know...

A beta version of the new utility, Sliceline, is available for free download at

http://www.ctrl-x.net

in the downloads section.

Features:
Tap tempo with the spacebar
Convert BPM to seconds or samples at any of the popular sample rates.

As far as quantizing audio...not sure there...sorry.

Good Luck!!!

i'm a sonar user but i'm not sure if there is a way to quantize or tempo map audio. often i will lay down some sort of click track or real basic drum track first. i am starting to find the drum loops increasingly quick and useful for this too. i'll have to look into that quantizaton question a little more.

Cakewalk and AFAIK Sonar, have a command called "Extract Audio Timing" - that's the GOOD news. The bad news is that it probably WONT work with a guitar track, or poorly. The way it works is you select a track, then choose "extract audio timing", I forget which menu it's under; the pgm gives you a dialog box to set relative audio "strength" and a couple other parameters, then uses bursts above those levels to define beats. Works OK on drum tracks, sometimes even bass.

Somebody (forget who, maybe MOTU) has a pgm called Freestyle, that's supposed to let you play at whatever tempo you like and follow it. Don't know how well it works, probably not the way you need it to if things are normal...

Best way I've found is to use either drum loops or roll your own drum track in a style that fits with what you're trying to do, quantize it down to absolute zero (you're going to throw it away later anyway), loop it for 4-5 minutes, and use that for a click track. Then lay down a rhythm or bass track, whatever, and when the song has enough structure so you know where to do it, re-write the tempo track, putting in whatever accels or ritards you need. Then, Cake/Sonar will speed up and slow down where you wanted it to, and you can follow.

If you can't do it that way, you probably need to practice playing with a metronome until your playing catches up with your "song in your head" - this is one of the hardest things about playing with machines, but at least they don't spill beer into your mixer or leave cigarette butts ground into your new carpet or refuse to play that part "just one more time"... Steve

Thanks to all, especially knightfly.

Originally posted by tundrkys:
Thanks to all, especially knightfly.

Oh fine..."Especially Knightfly..." No problem. I understand...

to me the easiest way to set up tempo in sonar is by letting some sort of sound source respond to that default metronome that usually plays out of midi channel 10 on the first midi port . it triggers F#3 for it is the general midi note number for a hi hat.if you click that tee pee lookin thing next to the tempo
view window you can tap in your tempo with the mouse in that box right under the numeric tempo display

Hey guys, I'm not 100% sure of how to do it, but I think there's a way you can build a tempo map in Sonar based on a midi note on. You would setup a midi track and tap a series of notes at regular intervals based on the previously recorded audio track. Sonar would then build a tempo based on the timing of the notes. Once, you have the tempo map, you can quantize the midi to the audio.