For those of you with the Discrete Drums collections, here is a cool method of using the loops in any song and at any tempo you like.

Sonar XL is a great program, and to date, the only one I know that offers the following audio editing and successful beat slicing for the Discrete Drums Professional CD Collection.

The loops discussed here are not the collection for VS-2480 owners, but the first CD Collection that offers 8 tracks of audio per song, in their different orders of verse1, verse2, chorus etc.

These files are recorded as set BPM's, and are not acidized. Consequently, their usage is limited - until now!

Open up Sonar XL and create a template exactly as below. This will enable you to use the same template over and over again for the different folders from Discrete Drums. Also, make sure that you set up your audio options to 24 bit in both bit rate sections, or the samples will not load. (Thanks to Charles for that one!).

To be able to correctly change the BPM's within the different DD collections, it is imperative that you set Sonar XL to the same BPM as the titles you will be importing BEFORE you actually import any tracks! I am going to use the Levon series which is 124BPM. So set Sonar's tempo to 124. Next, make sure that you are at the start of the song and marking the first track (Kick), go to File and import your first 8 files simultaneously.

Sonar XL will conveniently place your files in the order they were imported. If you only see the first track with audio, then all the other files are underneath and you will need to drag them to their respective tracks. To avoid this scenario again, make sure that in your Paste options, you unmark where it says Copy To One Track. Your tracks will look something like the screen capture below.

If you only want to test the first 8 tracks for fun, then that's fine. Please note however that if you want to be able to use the tracks for a song, and require to change the BPM, then you must import all the tracks (from each folder) first. Levon has 8 folders, each with 8 files. So the complete song will have 8 tracks and 64 files. It's a bit of work, but very worthwhile as you will soon see, so import all the files to their tracks and save the work as a normal Sonar file. I have called mine Levon124.

Double click on the very first track/file (Kick/Verse Kick) and Sonar's Slicing Tool window will appear. We now need to "print" the file with it's original BPM so click on the Orig. BPM: and the small window will turn white and show 124. Do this to all files one by one.

Once you have clicked the Orig. BPM: it will appear like this, confirming that the audio file is now stamped with it's original BPM value.

Once you have stamped all files, save your song again. Now here is the cool part: Change the tempo of Sonar and press play. You will notice that the drums now play faster/slower depending on the BPM you chose. Now you can re-arrange, copy and paste to your hearts content.

That's it!