I've seen a few programs that offer to reduce the vocals from songs so you can use them with karaoke. I'm trying to do it the other way around. I would like to remove the background music from the song so all you hear is vocals. One thing I can think of is when studios put together songs they (good bit of them) use Pro tools, I wonder if there's any way to get ahold of the songs in the protools format so it could be pulled off as vocals only. Hmmmmm.

Allegro has easy to use sound processing functions. Or FMOD. The voice manipulation programs just disable channels on special made audio tracks. Worst case, you manipulate like an equaliser...

The problem with manipulating it by hand using an equalizer or those other methods described is that not just vocals fall within the same frequencies. Advanced heuristics need to be employed in order to "properly" set up filter patterns to remove overlayed audio sources (ie. vocal and instrumental). The NSA/CIA/FBI have such tools, but you can be guaranteed they paid a lot of money for them.

Failing that, I believe Adobe Audition 1.5 should have some vocal extraction capabilities to separate a cappella tracks in addition to making karaoke tracks.

On the first version of SingStar that is exactly what Sony did - they got the original multitrack masters from the record companies and remixed them so that they had instrumental and acapella versions.

You can use a parametric EQ to notch the 2-4khz range. This is where the vocals will be 99% of the time. That is a cheap and fairly effective way to remove them. You will lose some audio quality along the way, but no matter the software, this will be the case. (Even if it is smarter than this notch filter.) This is somehting you can do with almost any shareware audio software.

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Original post by DIB You can use a parametric EQ to notch the 2-4khz range. This is where the vocals will be 99% of the time. That is a cheap and fairly effective way to remove them. You will lose some audio quality along the way, but no matter the software, this will be the case. (Even if it is smarter than this notch filter.) This is somehting you can do with almost any shareware audio software.

I'll have to try that. I'm not too worried about the quality becuase I want to try and remix some songs into trance/dance style music. So noise is... well for the most part dance/trance is just that =) lots of noise =) The drums should easily cover it up.

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Original post by jeffie7 I'll have to try that. I'm not too worried about the quality becuase I want to try and remix some songs into trance/dance style music. So noise is... well for the most part dance/trance is just that =) lots of noise =) The drums should easily cover it up.

Remember: Doing this with your own music for your own listening is fine. Doing it for distribution with a game (even if you only give it to a few close friends) is probably a violation of international copyright law.

If you want to redistribute your remix legally, you need to have written permission from the singers, songwriters, and everybody else involved in the making of the original recordings.

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Original post by frob Quote: Original post by jeffie7 I'll have to try that. I'm not too worried about the quality becuase I want to try and remix some songs into trance/dance style music. So noise is... well for the most part dance/trance is just that =) lots of noise =) The drums should easily cover it up. Remember: Doing this with your own music for your own listening is fine. Doing it for distribution with a game (even if you only give it to a few close friends) is probably a violation of international copyright law. If you want to redistribute your remix legally, you need to have written permission from the singers, songwriters, and everybody else involved in the making of the original recordings.

Thats a givin =)

Cool Edit Pro had a feature called Vocal Cut which did exactly that. Or something similar to it, at least. The idea behind their Vocal Cut is that on most recordings, the vocals are in the center, while the instrumentation is distributed on both stereo channels, so if you invert the left channel and mix it with the right channel, both signals will eventually cancel out themselves, leaving you only with the signal in the "middle". Results depend on the source track of course, ranging from poor to very useful (if you Vocal Cutted Depeche Mode's "World In My Eyes (oil tank mix)" you had pretty much all the vocals without music).

Since Cool Edit Pro is now Adobe Audition, you might want to try out a demo version to find out whether it works with the songs you are looking for.


A perfect vocal extraction from a song without any noise or instruments is impossible - just like getting the complete egg out of a cake again.

its imposible to remove vocals of a track and have the sound quality remain "good "

the voice is located in a certain range but its widespread and a lot of other
instruments or sound use the same range

so unless you have the original studio tracks with voice and other sounds on separate tracks dont think you will do miracles :( unfortunatly