I don't know anything about Sonar 7, but I'd suspect that this system will be pretty much the same as other packages of the type.

I think I understand what you're talking about. You record your music, and the system applies all sorts of 'adjustments' to what you've played to 'fit' the recording to a 'correct' structure. Whether you like it or not!

I have some old DOS systems that either did not do this, or did not do it so drastically, and the midi file created can still be a total mess, with notes all over the place, tiny notes (1/32 or even 1/64ths) cluttering the place up, notes (in effect) spread over bar boundaries, etc, etc. OK, I'm pretty CRAP with any keyboard/playing, but I'd suspect that even a good player will have problems.

Sounds like you want to do the initial recording in a 'raw' form, maybe you need to make sure that any sort of Quantise (quantize ?) is off, or maybe you need to change the resolution setting from the default untill you get a better result.

NB - the system is TRYING to HELP you, of course. By adjusting the notes to fit the bars/tempo. This will be very difficult to adjust after the recording is done. It's probably a matter of allowing some level of adjustment (to keep things approx within tempo etc) and then doing some small adjustments afterwards?

I'd be interested in trying one of your files. To hear how it sounds, and see what it looks like. It may well SOUND a LOT better that it LOOKS??

I suspect that if a composer wrote his score, and then played the piece and recorded it using midi, and then printed out the resultant score, it would look VERY LITTLE like his original written version? No matter how carefully he was trying to play it??

Geoff

Essentially, Sonar 7 and all other MIDI sequencing programs I've come across, record the MIDI notes of a live session according to the tempo and time signature set within the MIDI sequence at the time of recording. By default this is usually 120 bpm and 4/4 time. So, what you've recorded may mismatch the MIDI timing quite substantially.

To get anything like the notation matching the played sequence one has to spend many happy hours (often) doing something called tempo mapping.
In other words matching the MIDI timing to the timing of the sequence played.

Some programs are easier to use than others to align MIDI tempi with played notes, but I've always found it quite a laborious process.

Is there a way to set Staff view so it just records notes without attempting to apply meter and bar lines?

The staff view doesn't record anything, it's just a representation of what it finds in a MIDI track.
Sonar will record the notes you play at the time you play them, it does not move them at all. Indeed, when you play back what you recorded, it will sound exactly like it did when you recorded it.
When you tell Sonar to show your notes in the staff view, it can't magically determine your tempo changes and time signature changes. It will use the default tempo and time signature or the specific settings you set them to and show you where your notes fall within those parameters. It is possible that the staff view is set to "snap" to certain boundaries, but that is just the visual representation, it will not actually change the timing of your notes. You can change the "Display Resolution" which is what I suspect you want. Have a look at the Staff View documentation.

It sounds like the "Set Measure/Beat at Now" command might be the kind of thing you are looking for, but I can't tell if that is available in your particular version of Sonar 7.

(I recently installed the free "Cakewalk by BandLab" and it has this command. If you're interested in installing that, click the banner at the top of any cakewalk.com page.)

Thank you very much for these replies! I'm attempting to work through them. Since I'm a dinosaur and insist on using old stuff, hard to apply later documentation in some cases -- for instance there's no Notes option in Sonar 7's Edit menu.

I read somewhere that Sonar 7 is easier to use than later versions for my simple purpose -- MIDI sequencing classical music -- and Youtube demonstrations seem to confirm this, though Reaper looks refreshingly similar. I suppose there's a simple way to get the screen down to the basic level I use in any major sequencer, but it's rarely seen in those videos of different brands.