What software would you suggest? (replacing sound track)

[JDługosz]

I've done OK preparing some video shot with my camera to share and post on You-Tube, using AVIDEMUX to do simple trimming and joining as well as give me ultimate control over the encoding.

But then I wanted to "fix" the recorded sound which was too low. So I saved the sound only and used Audacity to subtract out the noise and then boost the volume, and then had to find another tool to stick the modified sound back in (mkvmerge GUI). The results were so good that I went and removed noise from video that was "OK" before.

Now I want to replace the recorded sound track with the file that they were playing over the loudspeakers while I made the video, going from awful to great in a simple step. But, I'll need to get them in sync. I suppose I could figure out how to use Audacity to do that and save a result that fits exactly where the old one was, but I'm wondering if there is a better tool to show audio and video together, do the cuts and sync, all at once.

Years ago (before Hi-Def) I used Premere 1.5, but the current version gives me sticker shock. If I'm using a myrid of different tools maybe I'd be better off with a unified editing program. But then again, different tools have their strengths.

Is there a free tool I might use (I'm running Windows) to replace and easily sync up the sound track?

Is there a more cost-effective editing suite I might look into?

[aedipuss]

no there aren't any decent free ones at this time. your best is to find something like sony movie studio on sale. goes as low as $40-50 at times.

[fvisagie]

I'm not sure about my suggestion because it differs from aedipuss' , but anyway here goes. Most free or cheap video editors allow you to load a video file, add an audio file, mute the video file's audio track (if it has any), line up the added audio and render. For quick projects Windows Movie Maker up to 6.0 did the trick for me, but as I said there are many others that can do this. Although Movie Maker 6.0 was never distributed separately from Windows Vista, there are Internet downloads for it.

Something specific to look out for in an editor is the ability to do direct copying of both your input video and audio formats, preventing damaging re-encoding.

Hope I'm not talking cr@p here!

Cheers,
Francois

[budwzr]

Sony Vegas is an excellent recommendation because it has audio editing built in.

[JDługosz]

Hmm, what about Lightworks?