Song Identification and Removal

Greetings,
My name is Jerry, and my primary operating system is Linux Slackware 14.2 (patched), and I often record public events such as parades, festivals, and community events, as a function of my non-profit charity [link removed]. However; many of those activities can not be posted on places like Youtube, as there are always parade floats, and booths, that play copyrighted music in the background, and Youtube either de-monetizes the video, or blocks the video completely.

Currently, I use ffmpeg to rip the audio track from the video, then use Audacity 2.3.2 which I compile from source code, to import a copyright free song and mix it into the audio track. Say for example, during a parade, I fade-in the copyright free song (adjusting for Doppler volume), so that it’s always louder than the copyrighted music, so that the copyrighted music is being drowned out, then as the parade passes, I fade-out the music.

I have tried loading in the data file of a copyrighted song, to use it as the sample for Audacity’s Noise Reduction plugin, in the hope it would identify the song as noise and remove it, but that ideal failed.

Would there be any way to add this as a plugin into audacity? A plugin that could use an input song (wav, mp3, ogg, ect … ) to learn what a song sounds like, then search and remove, or at least reduce the volume of that song, in a larger audio track?

Similar to noise reduction, but identifying the song as the noise needing removed, or reduced, while leaving the other sounds largely untouched.

Audacity’s vocal-isolation uses spectral-subtraction which could attenuate the music, if you have a copy of the music in isolation in-sync with where it occurs in the parade recording.
There will be a lot of digital artefacts though.

There has recently been some work from Audacity developers to introduce “Source Separation”. I’ve not tried it yet, but it sounds like a very exciting new feature. Hopefully it will be available soon.

“Source Separation” … sounds like a very exciting new feature. Hopefully it will be available soon.

And until it is, unwanted background music and performances are a good way to kill your show. See #4.

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Koz