Is there a way to isolate ONLY voices in a recording. If so, what steps need taken to save them?
It is “sometimes” possible to produce some degree of isolation (almost never total isolation) if the recording is stereo.
See here in the manual: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_vocal_removal_and_isolation.html
The Party Line is Audacity can’t be used to separate a mixed performance into individual voices, instruments and sounds. The process fails way more often than it succeeds. If you do get one to work well, then you got very lucky. Do Not post a YouTube video how easy it was.
Koz
Well, generally you can isolate voices if there’s only 1 to isolate and if you do spectral editing / source separation (Not recommended for casual / novice users - Also not recommended if your vision isn’t too good since it relies on staring at spectrograms).
If the recording is multiple voices, then I’d consider it a lost cause. I’ve seen experimental MATLAB scripts which can isolate multiple people talking under very specific circumstances, but other than that I don’t think any commercial or freeware applications can do this for you since combined voices overlap like crazy and, as far as I know, there are no programs which can do this even remotely.
If it’s a song and the backing vocals are noticeably higher than the lead vocal and they’re prominent, then there’s a chance you can isolate those with readily available software such as ADX TRAX (Mac only).