Hi. I´ve recently installed Audacity 4 on my iMac with Golden Gate 27.2 operating system and also tried to download Intel OpenVINO Separation to remove the vocal from audio files. This obviously doesn´t work.
Questions: 1. When will the plug-in be available for Mac 27.2? 2. Is the plug-in (Intel?) compatible with my machine (which has a M1 chip? 3. Can I download an earlier version of Audacity which the plug-in will work with? And 4 (most important: What can I use instead today which will give me the best possible result for vokal removal?
Thank you, and best regards.
Per Christian Hanssen (in Norway)
All I know is that openvino will get re-added at some point in the future. Whether they’ll do it for mac is questionable, it wasn’t until now and as these plugins are made by Intel, they aren’t too keen on having to support non-intel platforms.
In the meantime, I have added the various models found in openvino to Soundscaper. I haven’t tried them yet on mac though as I don’t have one.
I tried the OpenVINO music separation on Windows a while back, for pulling a vocal out of a game track I wanted to study, and it worked better than I expected. The vocal came out a little watery, but it was still clear enough to hear the phrasing.
I have not tried it on a Mac, and the Intel name in it does make me wonder how well it would ever fit Apple Silicon. The Soundscaper tip from Leo sounds worth a try while the plugin is missing. I would be curious to hear how it goes on your iMac.
Yeah, the Audacity OpenVINO plugin doesn’t support Mac, so your M1 isn’t the issue. LeoWattenberg and NorrisFByrd are right.
I’d just use Ultimate Vocal Remover (UVR) instead. It’s free, runs locally on Apple Silicon, and even supports GPU acceleration for Demucs v4 and MDX-Net.
Only catch is that Demucs model weights have some licensing uncertainty, so worth checking if you’re using the results commercially.
I also wrote a bit about offline AI audio tools here if you’re interested: AI Audio Tools That Run Offline, and the Hardware You Need