best way to put audio in presentation at certain volumes and times?

i’m looking for a way to be able to use audio almost as a transition similarly to how in PowerPoint, you could stagger animations of certain elements on the screen. I’m essentially looking to do that with audio, but since I have not had as much experience with Canva, I am hoping you all will be able to help me.

Here are my options so far:

1. use the YouTube Embed feature to embed YouTube videos and just make them transparent. While I enjoy being able to time when these audios happen, it’s frustrating to not be able to set these at a specific volume and to have to upload separate shorter versions of these audios to youtube for this to work.

2. upload audio and drop it directly in the audio track. This has proven to be more difficult, as Canvas seems to have a habit of playing back the audio from the previous slide at the same time as the audio on the current slide, if the previous slides audio was deemed too long.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated!