Audio Editing in AE.....

.... is really not possible.

In After Effects, audio editing is slim to none. And editing becomes even more difficult when the audio and video are interleaved.

For my project, I had:
3 songs that pushes dancing lightning effects,
the actual video,
and the narrator's vocal waveforms.

All three could not a placed together for various reasons. My solution, or more a workaround, was to use three different programs simultaneously.

I used:
an audio program (Sound Forge),
a video editor (Vegas),
and After Effects.

I used Sound Forge to scrub the audio and find the important pieces of dialog that would force effects in After Effects. I then used the compositions in After Effects to break apart and nest the sequence. I broke the three main pieces mentioned above on different compositions.

I rendered in three quicktimes files with the Animation setting on (since this setting allows for an alpha channel).

These three renders were then placed into Vegas. Once in Vegas I could preview the video and make sure the video and audio link track lined up correctly. Then, based on subject changes I was able to transition the 3 songs throughout to keep the entire sequence from stalling.

I rendered again out of Vegas as a normal Quicktime file since it was now suitable to render in a final lossy format which would allow for smaller file sizes.

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It really is time consuming and involves a lot of waiting for each step to render. But this is by far the easiest way to get around the audio-video link. I tried just letting AE do preview rendering, but that involved a lot more time waiting in smaller increments.

By syncing most of the pieces as much as possible before tossing them into Vegas, allowed for a grander, clear picture of what was to come. But, do keep in mind that I had to re-render some sequences a few times since I would find small errors, and this again, would take time, but a mere re-linking to the new file was all that was needed in order to keep the sequence in order.

I hope this helps someone out!