Given two (stereo) recordings of the same song, I want to mix them into a single track, where the resultant sound comes from one of the source tracks. For example, the first verse could come from source1, the second verse from source2, the chorus from track 1 and so on. I can do this with cut/paste, and by manipulating envelopes, but both methods are cumbersome and often lead to audible clicks and pops.
Is there an easier way to obtain this?
(For completeness: I’m running 2.0.2 on Fedora 17).
No.
The envelope method should not give you clicks and pops as you can control the rate of fade between the songs. If you’re getting heavy bass pops at the cut points, then you may benefit strongly from removing DC from each track before you edit. Effect > Normalize > Remove DC. Don’t let the tool do anything else, and no you can’t do this after the edit. Then it’s too late.
You can also tell Audacity to edit at the zero crossing points and suppress clicks and ticks that way. That’s not likely to work for you because you have to match up critical crossings for four different tracks. This was originally a Mac question, but the discussion is valid.
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/pops-at-edit-points/27267/10
Koz
Thanks for the suggestions. I think using envelopes is the best alternative, although I do find working with envelopes a bit cumbersome. For example, it is not possible (as far as I know) to ‘tie’ the envelopes so that if one enevelope goes down, the other goes up keeping the netto volume the same. But it works better than cut & paste 
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it is not possible (as far as I know) to ‘tie’ the envelopes so that if one enevelope goes down, the other goes up
That sounds like a feature request. I’ve wanted that several times during music production.
An engineer called Skip McKlusky once cut between English and Spanish versions of a then-current dance song and made it much longer to the bargain. It was an instant super hit for WKYS and everybody wanted to buy it.
Oh. Right. You sorta can’t buy it. It’s the station’s mix.
I think they put McKlusky into witness protection.
Koz