Extract vocal sample from song samples?

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

Hello,

This is my first post on the audacity forum, so first off, I’d like to say hi! Hello Audacity Forum people!

Now to the issue. I have a song that contains a certain phrase. The good news is that because it repeats in various parts of the song, I have found 5 instances of the phrase and lined all of them up so there is no echo, what’s left from all of these samples is various instances of background music. My question is that, if I have 5 instances of an identical sound clip, is there a way I could extract that one similar phrase from all of the instances? I got the idea from a video that showed how you could extract vocals from a song if you had a high quality audio file of the original song and a high quality instrumental version of the song, you can line them up as closely as possible, and then invert one of the clips, resulting in the music “canceling” in both clips and leaving behind the vocals. It almost seems like subtraction in that instance, but what I need to do here is find similarities between two clips and get the result from that. Does audacity possess such a feature?

Thanks,
Dragos

2

For that to work the instrumental versions must be identical. Just sounding the same is not enough, they need to be identical on a microscopic “sample” level.

Sadly the opposite process does not work.
The task that you describe is called “vocal isolations” and it is extraordinarily difficult for any software to achieve. There are some suggestions of things you could try here (but don’t have high expectations): Missing features - Audacity Support