trabant wrote:I'd guess that most professionals take a reverse engineering approach
If they own the rights to the original recording, they probably also own the original multi-track recordings, so then they can just mute the channels (the instruments or vocals) that they don't want. Alternatively, they may re-record the whole thing with the arrangement that they want.
Another approach that can work with electronic music (synthesizers and samplers) is that the music may have been composed with a
MIDI sequencer, in which case they can mute unwanted MIDI channels, or patch them to other sounds.
trabant wrote:Would you have an idea of which software might be able to "split a song apart into individual musical instruments"?
If you have a spare $700 and lots of time for note by note editing,
Celemony Melodyne.
Some more affordable plug-ins are listed here, but are unlikely to do much better (if at all) than Audacity's "
Vocal Reduction" effect:
https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Voca ... l_Plug-ins