Help with uncensoring an audio track in audacity

[adidasos]

I need help with uncensoring a censored track in Audacity. It will be just one step in the larger process of uncensoring a music video by replacing the censored audio demuxed from the .vob file with retail CD uncensored track. I can't replace the whole track outright in some cases. I have to copy and paste in the swear words, etc due to there being sounds, or lengthy audio portions in the video audio not in the CD audio, or the lengths of said audio tracks don't match. To be able to copy and paste I have to be able make both tracks the same volume (normalize/sound leveling/maximize volume, whatever). I have tried some programs that do this. But their results where unsatisfactory. Some have settings for different levels of change, but what settings will get me my desired results? If they are not exactly the same volume wise or damn near to it when you cut and paste, the stuff you paste in will be too loud or soft. So how do I get them this close in volume? Then I need to be able to copy the portion(s) of the uncensored audio over the exact same portion(s) of the censored audio track, no more no less. It has to exact. But I have yet to be able to do this also. I know about marking points or spikes in the wave forms on each track to use them to match up/sync the tracks, but I have to have good method of normalizing or what not before I can do that or else it's too hard, one track's too small & one track's too big.

Also is there any way to get audacity to both accept .ac3 files (without converting them!) and output them (without converting them!) I thought I had found a way, but I'm pretty sure it's just importing them now but converting them back to .wavs when it does.

Can anyone help? Thanks!

[steve]

See this post for details of the cut and paste part. http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 315#p33616

The first slider under the name of the track is a volume slider - you can use that to work out how much to adjust the volume so that the "patch" matches the main track, then use the "Amplify" effect to apply the necessary amount of boost/reduction (don't forget to return the volume control back to zero), you are then ready to move onto the next beep.

Audacity always works on uncompressed audio. This is to allow it to perform a large range of editing and processing tasks.

[kozikowski]

Yup. Audacity will not open Dolby AC3 files directly. Most other editors won't, either. Dolby AC3 has interlocking relationships between all the audio tracks. That's how the compression works, so there's no such thing as just editing Front-Left. You have to decode the performance into six discrete audio tracks and then edit Front-Left.

The other thing you're going to notice is an extreme increase in file sizes when you do that. AC3 is pretty efficient at compression. One tiny AC3 track will blow out to six full, uncompressed audio files.

Koz