For what I understand your question is:
you have a video with its own (inferior) audio and you have a separate audio file with the same recording but much better audio. And you want to replace the audio from the video by the separately recorder audio.
PD indeed cannot have both two separate audio tracks and the video in the same track on the timeline. But you have a stand alone audio track in another track. What you do is this:

• Put the video with its original audio on track 1


• Put the separate audio file on track 2
  [ulist]
  [list]Select both tracks so that the video in track 1 and the audio in track 2 turn blue to indicate selected.


• You will notice that in the menu line right above the timeline the option appears: Sync by Audio. This is of course the thing to do, because you still want the audio to match the video.


• If all is well, PD recognizes that the audio of the video and the separate audio are the same. PD will shift the video and audio files such that the audio of both are in sync.


• when you preview the video you will be able to check whether that is the case.


• if you want to make sure that for all subsequent steps audio and video remain the same, then cut off any beginning and end pieces in both the video (1) and audio (2) track, WITHOUT moving or shifting them, so e.g. delete and leave the gap.


• Now you want to switch off the audio from the video in track 1. There are two options:


• The easy way is to unselect the audio in track 1. Try to preview again and the audio from track 2 plays with the video of track 2


• The other option is to right click on the video and select “unlink video and audio”.


• You can now click on the audio track that will turn blue with the video turning blue, and delete the audio.


• You might go as far as to move the audio from track 2 to the audio in track 1, but the chances are high that the audio becomes out of sync again. So better leave it in track 2.

There is also the option to use the multi cam designer, but that is the better option if you have more than 1 video file of the same along with the audio file.
I always go for the first option and leave the audio where it is for later reference. With the audio disabled, it will not be in the way, when producing the video.

also see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4EBEWqwQwY

Have fun!

Quote

..................I need to now put the microphone audio track immediately adjacent to the video's existing audio track so I can visually synchronize the two tracks by matching audio wave tracings. After that is done, I then want to mute the inferior audio track of the video, and just use the microphone track to render a new video....

Hi,

By way of completeness, and in addition to the synch by audio technique that Warry illustrated, if you actually want the clips to be vertically adjacent and do manual synching, try the following:

Before you move anything to the timeline rt click on the empty timeline
>Add Tracks> Add 0 video track , 1 audio track above Track 1, 0 effect tracks>OK

That adds an audio track above the old track 1

Rt click on the timeline again
>Add Tracks> Add 1 video track above Track 1, 0 audio tracks, 0 effect tracks>OK

That gives a new video track as T1 and a new audio track as T2

Drop the combined video/audio recording to T1 and the audio recording to T2 and then the waveforms are actually vertically adjacent and you can go ahead and manually synch by waveform.

Don't forget that you can expand the horizontal scale of the timeline and also the vertical scale of the tracks to make it easier to get fine adjustments.

Cheers
PowerDirector Moderator

Thanks so much for the help! I think it makes sense and will give it a try. Again, appreciate your time and effort.