I have an episode of a series where the audio goes out of sync about 17:04 into the video. I found out that part of the audio is missing, about 56 seconds of it. I found this out because I have another copy of the episode. However this copy stops playing at 17:04 whereas the newer copy continues playing but with out of sync audio. I viewed the stopped video using VLC and after the video stops I hit the “E” key (next frame) until the video starts again. This was at the 18:00 mark. The video was in sync at this point. That gave me the 56 second delay, or missing audio time.

I extracted the audio from the stopped video version. However, either audio version of the episode would have worked. I loaded the audio into Audacity, split the track at the 17:04 mark and dragged the split off audio section to the 18:00 mark. I saved the audio and rebuilt the MKV file. The audio was still out of sync but I knew it couldn’t have been off my much. I loaded the video into MPC-HC and did the keypad “+’ or “-“ audio delay or advance thing. It turned out I was off by -400ms.

Here’s my easier way question.
I loaded the audio back into Audacity. The only way I could find to adjust the split off section by -400ms was to magnify the track view until the time displayed above the track showed time in thousands of a second increments, perhaps it was ten thousands increments. Then I had to move the split off section of the track back 400ms. So the split off section started at 18:0566 and I hade to find 18:0166. That’s a lot of dragging. I think I did minimize the magnification to get it closer to where I wanted it them increase the magnification to get it accurate. I prefer using a time counter but I don’t think there is a way to have a counter on the split off section because Audacity views the whole thing as one track even though part of it has no sound.

My method worked but was there an easier way to accurately insert no sound into an audio track. Hopefully I won’t have to do this again. I'm using Audacity v3.0.2

Thanks