I have a multi-track recording of a song. What I want to do is to save this as an mp3, but WITHOUT the vocal tracks; in other words, a background track mp3. I tried clicking the “mute” button on the unwanted tracks and saving it, but that didn’t work. Is there a way to do that?
Rasely
Try this tutorial from the Audacity Wiki: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Vocal_Removal
WC
wc-
Thanks for the help. I understand what they are suggesting, but I don’t think that’s exactly what I have in mind. This seems to be one of the limitations of this program.
Although I did discover a complete solution to my problem. What I did was to take the gain completely out of the two vocals parts. Then when I saved them as a brand new wav file, the vocals didn’t transfer with the rest, and I have a very clean instrumental bed. This seems to me like an awful lot of steps to go through, but it worked.
After I did this, I moved the vocal settings back. If anyone else tries this method, I suggest that you write down the gain settings somewhere, so you can re-set them. I don’t understand why the “mute” button didn’t make any difference; you’d think that it would affect the playback same as the gain adjustment, but apparently not.
Rasely
you can just save one copy of the song with all the tracks in it, then delete the tracks you dont want (vocals) then “save as” a different file name, ie song no vox, then export this to mp3. This way you will have 2 songs saved essentially the same but one without vocals. You would then have 2 files
eg song.aup
and song no vox.aup.
If you dont want to keep the no vocal song on you computer then just delete the aup file along with its matching folder. Just make sure you dont delete the wrong thing
this is another way around your problem
I note from the list of effects in 1.3.5 (and from the 1.3.5 release notes) that the developers have added a new Vocal Remover plug-in.
WC