Exactly. 
I’m going to chime in here because this is something I’ve been wondering about for a while.
And maybe we’re talking about two different things…
Back in the days of Cakewalk, pre-Sonar days (and I think the first Sonar had that), you had a record, and a pause button that allowed you to record anywhere on a track from a stop positions.
I loved it, and I’ve never found that feature again. I stop making music for 10 years and when I came back to DAW’s it was all count down to recording, punch in/out, or loops.
The closest is a autorec max4live app that does something similar. I don’t understand why that’s not a common feature
I also spent a fair amount of time just now trying to figure out why punch-in was not working with Looper enabled and an external clock.
Is there anyway to increase the count-in time when you hit rec with the transport running? Right now it seems to wait until a new a bar.
It seems that when using the auto-length function, the pattern length always jumps to the nearest bar when stopping recording, even if that means leaving out recorded notes. As far as I can tell, there is no way of recording a length such as 4.3, or 6.2 for example.
This is a pretty big setback for my anticipated style of working with the hapax, as I would like to live record multiple tracks of differing lengths quickly, to explore polyrhythms and shifting harmonies and that sort of thing. Is there any way that I can disable the auto-length from quantizing to the nearest bar?