Manually Censoring a Song

A.H. · Post by **A.H.** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 1:40 pm

Listen to "Cocky" by Kid Rock, and you'll understand why I'm asking this.

I've heard an already censored version of this song, making some sort of disk scratch or explosion where an obscenity occurs, but I couldn't find it myself. So I figured I'd do it myself. What I need to do is be able to tune out the vocals in certain parts without cutting out the backround music. So which program does this goal require? BeSweet? WaveBooster? Audacity?

madmallard · Post by **madmallard** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 4:47 pm

no such easy way to do it. You'll have to play with more than one feature to get the desired effect.

Or do like Zombie and reverse the wave of the swear word. ;p

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 7:10 pm

Audacity actually details a vocal-removal process in its help files. However, it is not guaranteed to work for all songs, and you'll be able to hear the difference in the background music when you switch from the original version to the version without vocals.

What you do is separate the left and right channels, invert one or the other of them, and then combine them into a mono track. Usually, this works fairly well, because usually the vocals (and sometimes the bass) are the only thing that's recorded exactly in the center, so they're the same on both channels. Therefore, inverting one channel and recombining makes the vocals from each channel cancel each other out. But like I said, you'll be able to hear the difference in the background music.

Unsent Vibes · Post by **Unsent Vibes** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 9:10 pm

Generally, just replacing it with a *beep* sound is acceptable. But the vocal removal technique Scintilla suggested is your best bet.

Personally, I highly suggest Adobe Audtion (Also known as Cool Edit Pro), it's what I use for all my audio editing. You might also find a vocal remover program at analogx.com.

A.H. · Post by **A.H.** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 11:12 am

Man, you weren't kidding. Not only could I still easily make out the vocals in the main chorus, but the bass pretty much vanished. Unless I can find some obnoxiously long sound to layer on top of the curses, trying to fiddle with this sort of thing will only make the audio loads worse.

Hope you guys can deal with 17 different variations of the f word.

DemonSpawn · Post by **DemonSpawn** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 2:55 pm

If you have a graphical equalizer (like in Sound Forge) you can adjust the volume of the specific frequencies. You could keep your bass this way, as all the bass is to the left, while almost all voice is in the middle. Just make sure you do it to the specific sections, not the whole song.

By itself, this might not work, but you could combine it with some of the other techniques mentioned. I'm sure if you play around with it long enough, you can get something that sounds halfway decent.

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 5:27 pm

Unsent Vibes wrote:Generally, just replacing it with a *beep* sound is acceptable.

Does anyone know where to get/how to make a *beep* sound that sounds like an actual censoring *beep* and not like a telephone *beep*?

madmallard · Post by **madmallard** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 11:36 pm

tone generator?

Unlimited Rice · Post by **Unlimited Rice** » Fri Jun 18, 2004 11:29 pm

i've tried it once..

i just cut a small section from the song that's in the background.. and i copy and paste it over the swearing word..

so far... i got lucky a few times and it worked pretty good