I have recently downloaded Audacity 2.0.0 using .exe installer and have briefly used the program to delete vocals from various audio tracks. I am using windows vista on a HP Pavilion dv6000 series laptop.
I lead worship for my church with Kurzweil PC3 keyboard. I wish to focus more on singing and require less attention to the accompaniment. Our church now has large screen and projector. I use my computer to output video and audio using the program “Open LP”. I have begun using Youtube videos occasionally to sing along with. I wish to use Audacity for removing vocals and altering key signature, but I also wish to be able to preserve the final product with the video. I know very little about video and audio editing. My question is the following:
Can Audacity work with the audio within a video or must I extract it first? If audio must be extracted before editing, is Audacity able to perform this function and also place audio back in sync with video? If Audacity is not able to perform these functions, what might be the best way to accomplish this task?
Audacity works exclusively with the audio part. If you have FFMpeg installed (Audacity Manual) then Audacity can import the audio part from several (but not all) video formats. The “picture” part is not imported.
I presume that you mean “removing vocals” and “changing the key”?
Removing vocals only works if the recording is a high quality stereo recording, and the vocal is dead centre in the stereo mix, and the other instruments are not dead centre. As you can probably guess from this list of requirement, vocal removal often does not work. See here for more information: Audacity Manual
To change the “key”, what you are actually doing is changing the “pitch”, which should preferably be done without changing the “tempo” (unless you actually want it to be faster or slower). Audacity has a quick, rough and ready effect called “Change Pitch” which works pretty well much of the time, but for some types of music (particularly piano music) can sound a bit “wobbly” and distorted. Audacity also has a more advanced effect that has higher quality pitch changing called “Sliding Time Scale / Pitch Shift”.
See here for details: Audacity Manual
Audacity does not do video. You will need to use a video program to put the sound and video back together. I think that Windows Movie Maker has some basic ability in this department, though there are much better video editors.