As far as stretching goes, it's not too bad. In order to actually cause a stretch, you just adjust the position of a stretch marker. For example, if you had a loop that you wanted to sink up with the tempo because the beats were slightly off, you would place stretch markers at the beginning of each beat on the audio item, but afterwards you would have to snap the stretch markers to the grid in order to make the audio align if that makes sense. So, for your example with the baseline, I would place one stretch marker on the last beat of the baseline, and then place another one at the very end of the audio. Then you can move the last stretch marker to the end of the final bar. I feel like I'm not making a lot of sense. Let me know if I'm confusing.

P.S. Off topic, but I wanted to ask you about your success with using some Native Instruments VST's with OCR. (Specifically, Absynth) I can somewhat navigate to an area where I see categories of presets, but I can't actually figure out how to pick a specific one. Can you run through how you manage to do it? O yeah. About the envelope thing. Instead of using automation, I usually just insert envelope points. So, if you wanted to work with the volume envelope for example, you would arm it for the track you wanted to effect, then you would place envelope points around the time selection you'd like to effect. It would probably be easier if I ended up making a recording of this, but just let me know.

I can't grab a stretch marker by any means, I tried but can't grab it basically, but the one thing i can do is place stretch markers between point one and three, and then do a snap to grid, but the problem now is that when ding so, it changes the pitch of  the  stretched section.  is there a preserve pitch function I'm missing?

EDIT: I figured it out, forgot that I need to preserve pitch of items, so yeah that's working and na nice workaround, so long as I remember that in the middle of a file, I have three points to stretch, not two, I should be alright.  this helps a lot.