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Author Topic: remove vocals from mp3  (Read 2999 times)

techidave

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remove vocals from mp3
« on: March 29, 2013, 04:39 PM »
I am trying to remove the vocals from a mp3 to make a karoke version - that is instrumental only.

I have tried using the instructions for Audacity like these

it removed most of the vocals but not all.  They were quieter but may still be too loud. i do not know if my vocals were center panned or not as that seems to make a difference.

is there another program that works better than Audacity 2.0.3?

thanks for the help,
Dave

Ampa

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Re: remove vocals from mp3
« Reply #1 on: March 29, 2013, 05:31 PM »
In my experience removing vocals from a song rarely works satisfactorily.

The usual technique relies on the vocal being in the center of the stereo mix, and the instrumentation panned left and right. The theory is that you strip out the center and are left with a karaoke version.

Problem is that virtually no tracks are recorded like this! Older records did often hard pan the band to all parts of the stereo space, but thanks to the loudness wars that isn't often the case any moreā€¦ after all you only get half the volume on your drums if they are only coming out of one speaker! And louder is always better ;)

Even if the original panning is a well defined as it would need to be for the technique to work well, as soon as you add any sort of reverb to the mix this blurs all the sounds, pushing the echos all over the place, such that when the center is removed you still hear the ghost of the original bouncing around.

All this can be controlled to a degree by filtering out the various frequencies where the vocal used to be, but since the human voice covers such a wide range of the spectrum, you will end up with a very muffled sound.

If there isn't an instrumental version of the track you are after in existance, then the only good solution I've ever found is to rebuild the track by sampling, looping and reconstructing major sections of the song. Have done this several times as paid work for TV and theatre, but it is difficult and time consuming.

Also consider finding a midi version and putting it through a really good soundfont, or even splitting it out to various virtual instruments.
« Last Edit: March 29, 2013, 10:35 PM by Ampa »

Renegade

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Re: remove vocals from mp3
« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2013, 08:21 PM »
I have two distinct answers...

First, the basics...

My software does close to what you're asking, and better than the Audacity way. (Look in my sig for the link.)

I'm not going to get into everything here as the software help file has a TONNE of information, and the web site has even more that explains this all in depth, and how you can get better results with my software with some tweaking.

The short version is that you can pan the mix around and do some EQing to get the right results, but it takes some fiddling and a decent ear to get the best results.

The second answer...

Melodyne.

They have software that does the job better than anything else out there. However, it's professional software and working with the audio takes a lot of work. It's also quite expensive. However, it's the best thing out there that I've seen. (I've not checked the scene lately, but it's unlikely that anyone else would bother to solve this problem given the massive amount of resources it takes.)



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