Audacity.

[Chris]

I've been messing around with Audacity, but I can't really seem to get it right. Is it possible to remove the music, so only the vocals are left standing? Help appreciated.

[rubah]

There's a plugin for winamp by analogx that removes the track that typically has vocals on it, but I'm not sure how you could use that to any good advantage.

[Shoeberto]

Not easily, and not within a good chance of just producing a bunch of yucky gobbledygook.

[Kappy]

Depends, if you're messing with a compressed file then no.
There are ways of getting around it but it's very complicated...

[crono_logical]

If you have a copy of the karaoke/no vocal version for that track, you can subtract it from the one with the voices, after making sure the music is aligned in both of them as perfectly as possible (since the tracks may be slightly different lengths due to silence). Works better the higher quality sources you have (e.g. CD), though I've still had nice results with higher bitrate mp3s myself

[Samuraid]

You can remove the voice manually from most songs, then do some subtraction with the original to get vocals (and any center-field instruments) only, but the result isn't going to sound pretty.

[crono_logical]

I wouldn't recommend using a vocal remover on a track, then subtracting the result from the same original source - whilst intuitively you'd think it will work (first create track without voice, then subtract result from track with voice so you only have voice remaining), this will fail miserably due to the way the vocal cut to create the instruments-only works.

The vocal cut, when performed on a stereo track, is done by adding the inverse of each channel to the other side - effectively cancelling out the "common" waveform between the two sides, usually the voice and anything else playing in the centre. Now when you go subtract this creature from the original you created it from, if you think through it mathematically, the result will effectively be the original with the left/right channels swapped, and no instruments/voice/anything will have been cut at all


Hence why it's best to get hold of a real instrumental or non-vocal version of the track, and subtract that instead



EDIT: One interesting thing I've found when doing this before is that the instrumental track you can commonly find isn't just the vocal one without the voices - there's sometimes one or two other instruments that's different between the two, so the end result is vocal plus one or two instruments playing, compared to the original of vocal with lots of instruments

[Chris]

*Head Exploding*

I'll try to figure it out.

Thanks for the help, guys!

[Samuraid]

I wouldn't recommend using a vocal remover on a track, then subtracting the result from the same original source - whilst intuitively you'd think it will work (first create track without voice, then subtract result from track with voice so you only have voice remaining), this will fail miserably due to the way the vocal cut to create the instruments-only works.

The vocal cut, when performed on a stereo track, is done by adding the inverse of each channel to the other side - effectively cancelling out the "common" waveform between the two sides, usually the voice and anything else playing in the centre. Now when you go subtract this creature from the original you created it from, if you think through it mathematically, the result will effectively be the original with the left/right channels swapped, and no instruments/voice/anything will have been cut at all


Hence why it's best to get hold of a real instrumental or non-vocal version of the track, and subtract that instead



EDIT: One interesting thing I've found when doing this before is that the instrumental track you can commonly find isn't just the vocal one without the voices - there's sometimes one or two other instruments that's different between the two, so the end result is vocal plus one or two instruments playing, compared to the original of vocal with lots of instruments

Exactly, but instead of simply inverting one channel and mixing both channels into one, it also helps to attenuate the lowest frequencies of one of the channels (the bands below the vocal range, to keep the original bass frequencies), then use a touch of reverb to bring the mono channel result back into a pseudo stereo field.