Remove background music

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

I have a audio segment of a anime robot fight scene and dialogs while background music is playing.

The music is contemporary orchestral string instruments, and it is not played back at the same volume throughout (not loud in some parts but louder in other parts.)

How should I edit the audio so that I can keep just the dialogs and sound effects?

I found the original music file, and I used noise reduction with the segment of music being played as the noise profile, but when I applied the noise reduction at various db and sensitivity, the reduction doesn’t seem apparent, and the dialogs and sound effects were greatly affected by the reduction.

High and low pass don’t seem very efficient either.

Youtube was able to filter out background music of a gameplay video so efficiently with just 1 click, how did they do it?

2

Also, I understand that keeping the dialog is relatively easier, but I also want to keep the sound effect, that’s the part I can’t figure out.

3

There is no easy tool for that. You are trying to split the different parts of a sound performance that to you seem independent.

#4.

The Four Horsemen of Audio Recording (reliable, time-tested ways to kill your show)
– 1. Echoes and room reverberation (Don’t record the show in your mum’s kitchen.)
– 2. Overload and Clipping (Sound that’s recorded too loud is permanently trashed.)
– 3. Compression Damage (Never do production in MP3.)
– 4. Background Sound (Don’t leave the TV on in the next room.)

Koz

4

There is a trick you can do with Vocal Removal. If the show is in stereo (required), you can use Effect > Vocal Removal to take out all the sounds that are exactly the same between the left and the right audio.

In a song, that’s usually the lead vocal. If you luck out, the background sound is mono and everything else is stereo.

Koz

5

Does 720p anime source simply this problem somehow?

6

Do you have a sample file to attach? A few seconds should be enough.

7

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxmYntn7lg9dUEY4bTRmSTMydlk/view?usp=sharing
Thx for the help

8

Thanks for the file, MuffinMan

The music is relatively loud.
A great deal can be removed by isolating the center but not all and what’s left has some artefacts.
The idea is of course to mix in your own music afterwards or to be content with a gentler setting that leaves more background but less artefacts.
First, the used tool:
I’ve applied “Center isolation” with the most extreme “Strength” setting.
The file has afterwards to be amplified (that’s normal with such high settings).
vocalrediso.ny (10.5 KB)
Place the tool in your plug-in folder and restart Audacity, if you want to try it out (Vocal Reduction and Isolation).
Important:
Works only with Audacity 2.1.0 or higher.
Here’s a sample file with alternating original/isolated center:

You can of course preprocess the wave file with e.g.

  • Expander/noise gate
  • noise reduction (with strings only profile, if you find a part with music only)
  • equalization and spectral selection (look in the spectrogram for long lasting frequencies)

I hope this helps.
Robert

9

Hey thx for looking into it.
I ended up using high-pass filter instead of center isolation because I don’t want to lose the higher frequencies of the sound effects, but the results is not as good as center isolation. I only do it on audio with no dialog so that only sound effects are processed. I will try again with center isolation with your settings