Remove One Blue Word from Song, Leave Background Music

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

I see how to remove all vocals from a song, but how would I remove just one blue word from a song, and leave the background music intact (including behind that word)?

This is an aif file, converted from an m4a file from the itunes stores.

'This is for a child.

Thanks.

Mac

2

You could try applying either “Vocal Remover” (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/vocal_remover.html) or “Vocal Reduction and Isolation” (Vocal Reduction and Isolation - Audacity Manual) to the part of the audio track that contains the word that you want to obscure. To do that, you need to “select” the part of the track that you want to process. See here for how to select audio: Selecting Audio - Audacity Manual

3

As soon as I select what is about the right area, it starts playing…and then it stops and deletes the start and end markers noting my selection.

This happens again and again.

There is no way to fine-tune the selection, because the range that I selected (3 secs) disappears after playing (auto play).

I read the manual.

I am stuck.

4

You need to make the selection on the actual waveform, not in the ruler above the tracks window. See: Selecting Audio - Audacity Manual

5

You drag-select some part of the song and it starts playing immediately?

Which version of Audacity do you have and did you get it from here?

https://www.audacityteam.org/

I know this isn’t your intent, but you are trying to remix an existing song. That’s not easy and we’re probably not going to get this in one or two key clicks.

I can think of different ways to do it, too. Find a portion of the song with the same notes but different words (many songs have repeating phrases) and copy/paste a new phrase over the dirty one. This, too, isn’t a single key click and it’s prone to errors and varying skill levels.

All this keeps dragging us back to finding a different song.

Koz

6

A simple technique for semi-sanitization is to reverse part of the blue word between two consecutive beats.

7

Thanks for the help.

I now have this working.

Mac

8

I now have this working.

How? Please report what you did to solve this. This is not a Help Desk. It’s a Forum with users helping each other.

Koz

9

I followed this advice from above:

You need to make the selection on the actual waveform, not in the ruler above the tracks window
See: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/audacity_selection.html

That and using the Vocal Remover effect did the trick.