Vocal remover (from CD) software
May 30, 2009 4:48 PM   Subscribe

The best software available for voice remover from a CD etc.
posted by page123 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
There is no good solution to this that I am aware of. With current technology it can be done if:

A. You have a track containing just the voice (sync and invert voice-only track to remove)
B. The voice is isolated in the stereo field from the other instruments (ie, voice panned center and instruments left or right, in which case invert one channel to remove). If it's only somewhat isolated you'll end up losing/distorting part of the instrumentation.
C. The voice is confined to a relatively narrow frequency range and you don't mind lopping that out along with everything else in that range.

With most music A is out of the question and B or C will yield imperfect results. Generally the better the song is mixed the harder it will be to isolate and remove the voice.
posted by waxboy at 5:03 PM on May 30, 2009


Yeah, this is really hard to do. I just took a class in music informatics, and we spent some time talking about this problem. Obviously, if you're in waxboy's situation A, and the voice was recorded separately from everything else, then you can do it. And if you're lucky and there isn't a whole lot of different instruments playing, you might be in his situation B or C, but even then, it wouldn't sound great. There is research in this direction, but the only even halfway decent results have been in the much, much, much simpler case of removing a single-voice instrument with a predictable sound (like a flute, or maybe an opera singer) when you already have a copy of the score that the musicians are all playing. And even then, the results are usually only passable because the way they're being used is in the situation where they're going to practice playing the flute solo with the accompaniment, and because most of the inappropriately removed sounds in the removal of the sound happen to sound very similar to what's going to be played over the top of them, so you don't always hear them. In any case, this is what the best researchers in the world have been able to accomplish so far, so there is nothing commercial out there that can magically remove the vocal track from pop music on a CD without the result sounding like complete and utter crap. I should emphasize that I'm not talking about crap from the point of view of some music or audio fidelity snob. I'm talking about the sort of thing that anybody would call crap.
posted by ErWenn at 7:09 PM on May 30, 2009


If this were possible, the makers of Guitar Hero would have likely done that instead of re-recording their own performances of songs. It was a big deal when they finally managed a contract to include original multitrack recordings.
posted by pwnguin at 7:17 PM on May 30, 2009


An old trick, a bit sloppy, that often (kinda) works is to invert one channel, then sum the two channels down to mono (many karaoke machines do this). This takes all of 10 seconds to set up in a program like PD if you know PD at all, and is similarly easy in supercollider, chuck, clm, csound, max/msp, whathaveyou. You can even do it by routing your buses the right way in a decent DAW.

This works when the vocals are exactly center in the mix, and you don't mind some potential alterations in tone quality to the other instruments depending how stereo seperation / reverb was set up. Older recordings tend to work better than new ones with this technique.
posted by idiopath at 7:28 PM on May 30, 2009


Agreeing that PD is probably your best shot if you're on zero budget. Odds are it won't work incredibly well, though, for the reasons described above.
posted by Alterscape at 6:38 AM on May 31, 2009


Response by poster: Thank you for this info. It was very helpful.
posted by page123 at 5:46 PM on June 1, 2009


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