making my own instumental

Justin_topia · Post by **Justin_topia** » Mon Oct 06, 2003 2:20 pm

I have a song that i want to extract the vocals from. I have already searched for an instrumental version, but it does not exsist. I was hoping that somebody could please give me some help in finding a software that will exstract them for me.

madmag9999 · Post by **madmag9999** » Mon Oct 06, 2003 4:07 pm

u might have truble doing this becouse u need a kareoke program and iv tried to look for one a while ago but it seems that its illeagel to do it w/o a kareoke machin or something like that. i suggest u search download.com for a kareoke program. u could also look on kazaa or something but like i said i could find anything that can do this.

Farlo · Post by **Farlo** » Mon Oct 06, 2003 4:16 pm

try using sound forge, you can tweak the eq on it to try and drop out the vocal range, but it might also take out some of the instrumental in the song.

Lyrs · Post by **Lyrs** » Mon Oct 06, 2003 5:47 pm

an option:

try finding the music sheet and then manually put the notes into whatever software that you can do that task. midi composition usually works, but i don't know about othe things.

koronoru · Post by **koronoru** » Thu Oct 09, 2003 12:33 pm

On some songs, depending on how the music was mixed, you can get pretty good results by computing the numerical difference between the left and right channels. In Cinelerra I'd do that by panning both channels to the centre and applying the "invert audio" plugin to one of them. On other songs, the result sounds like crap; and even if this technique works, it causes you lose to all the stereo information. Try it with your particular song and see if you can tolerate the results.

You can get commercial hardware or software to remove vocals. It is expensive. Some of it works by implementing the "subtract" technique mentioned above, and it works exactly as well as that technique works in any other implementation. Karaoke machines generally use the subtraction technique, and/or special recordings which (whoa, innovative idea here!) actually don't contain vocals in the first place. The fancier vocal removal boxes that the pros use (when absolutely forced to do so - no pro will be happy about using such a box) use special DSP algorithms that attempt to recognize the spectral profile of vocals. Some of those work pretty well. None of them are as good as you'd really like them to be.

There is no ultimately good way to do it because it is, fundamentally, a difficult problem. A vocal remover would have to analyse the sound, figure out which things in the sound "sound like" voice and which "sound like" instruments, and then separate them. Only a human brain can really do that, and even a human brain can't really get it right 100% of the time. Just try listening to one of those songs from when vocoders were cool - my favourite example being "Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James and the Shondels. There are points in that song where the electric guitar sound is used to pronounce understandable words (they ran the guitar and a mic into a vocoder). What should a vocal removal filter do with that? Even assuming it was able to separate out the vocoded-guitar sound in the first place (which would be a major feat) it's not at all clear whether it then ought to consider it a "vocal" or an "instrument".