how best to align two kick or snare sample tracks?

Align the transients at the beginning.

 

Im curious too john. As far as how to do this. Is there a tool for it?

If I'm understanding you correctly, you have a simple phase issue.  Normally you can nudge the audio back and forth to line the tracks up, after zooming way in to actually see the waveforms.  If for some reason that's not an option, even after bouncing the tracks to single audio clips, there are auto-phase plugins that do this for you.  I hope this helps.
 
Cheers,
Eddie
 

Have you tried audiosnap? Right click on the source track. Select Pool from the drop down menu, select add clip to pool. You will see the dotted lines elsewhere indicating they are all being used as a reference point. Right click on the destination track. Select pool from the dropdown menu, select quantize to pool. You will get a window that shows up with a few parameters to set for strength 

Rocky

joshcamp


thanks eddie, yeah thats bascially what ive been doing. tho, it is tedious when doing for the whole track or more tracks. just wondering if there is a better way. instead of nudging, ive been using audiosnap, which works great but takes a while to do.

If you're having to line up each hit separately, I can see that would be very tedious.  If avoiding that is worth $65 to you, try something like this:
 
http://www.meldaproduction.com/plugins/product.php?id=MAutoAlign 
 
Note:  I'm not sure if this will work in your case, but it might be worth a try.
 
Cheers,
Eddie
 

I guess I should explain. 

Drums are the easier to line up because they have strong initial transient sounds. The sound of the hit then its followed by the reverberation of the drum head. 

Ignore the last part and find the point on the sample that has the initial strike. By zooming in you should have no trouble seeing this hit. Then all you need do is move one or the other sample to match the hit. Use Aim Assist if you need to. I use the smart tool for this. It is very simple to do, far easier then to explain how to do it.

Of course you will need to turn off snap to grid.

If Audio Snaps transient detection worked and worked consistently than you could just auto detect and snap to grid in just a couple steps.

But it doesn't.

If you really want to get any two drum hits to hit at the same time you have to go in with audio snap and tediously hand edit the placement of all the transients before you use any of the automated "snap to" functions.



best regards,
mike