Technical support

I am using Windows 7. I have downloaded Audacity 2.2.2. I want to remove singer’s voice from a video so that it becomes a karaoke. I could easily upload the mp3 file through File-Open. I notice one track is visible. Not sure how to proceed further

I notice one track is visible.

You need stereo (left & right). Vocal removal works by subtracting left & right to remove the “center channel”. If the MP3 is stereo you can try it.

Vocal removal is usually imperfect. It will also remove centered lead instruments and any non-centered vocals will remain. I consider vocal removal to be a “novelty effect”, not something for serious audio production. Real Karaoke recordings are usually made from a different performance by a different artist with the vocals simply left-out, or on rare occasions they may be made from the original multi-track recordings.

Other than isolating the left or right channel, or this center-channel “trick” you cannot isolate vocals or instruments or un-mix audio. “You can’t in-bake an egg or un-fry and egg and you cannot un-mix audio.”

Note that ALL CDs are 2-channels and if you have a mono CD (with two identical channels) vocal removal will give you a totally silent file. MP3s ripped from a mono CD will usually be the same with two identical channels.

Vocal removal is a rather touchy (and tricky!) subject to discuss since lots of people say it can’t be done; To that, I somewhat disagree. More and more programs which attempt to do this stuff are showing up, and at least a few of them aren’t using any stereo trickery (Audionamix’s Mac-only products come to mind right away). There’s a web service which does both vocal removal and isolation, but it comes at $4 per song. It’s called PhonicMind. Depending on the song, it may or may not give a usable result for karaoke. It works on mono AND stereo files from what I can tell. It uses a neural network / deep learning to accomplish the task so it’ll only get better with time! :slight_smile:

Sadly, for some songs it will just be near impossible to remove the vocals effectively… The biggest offenders are drumless piano pieces with a singer which has a load of reverb on the voice. It is just about impossible to cleanly take out the vocals and remove the reverb as well without hearing any remnants /artifacts.