Overlaying a track on another

[danwrksallday]

So i have two instrumentals of one song, one with a small vocal intro (but a weird static clipping sound halfway through) and one that is clean but no vocal intro. the two are the same song but one starts up a little later so the timing is off. I need the vocal intro so i tried opening the clean instrumental and then importing the damaged one, with the intention of lining the two up, so the beat timing is perfect AND i get the vocal intro, then simply delete everything after the vocal intro in the flawed instrumental. only problem is the beat is not very easy to line up. so i wanted to maybe drag the vocal chunk literally over the the clean part, so i can match up the wavelengths better (assuming the vocal part is transparent or something) is there any way i can do this? or maybe a different approach that results in the beats being perfectly aligned? thanks!

[steve]

I would highly recommend using Audacity 1.3.12 for this sort of thing. http://audacityteam.org/download/

Line the tracks up roughly first so they are about right.
"View menu > Fit vertically" so that you can see both tracks as clearly as possible.
Adjust the zoom level so that you can see the "shapes" of the beats.

One beat highlighted

trackpanel000.png (28.07 KiB) Viewed 626 times

When you think it's right, zoom out a bit and play the two tracks.
It can sometimes help if you temporarily pan one of the tracks to the extreme left and the other to the extreme right (use the "pan" slider on the left end of the track), then you will hear one track playing in the left and the other playing in the right speaker/headphone.