I’m making a little compilation. One of the songs I want to put onto the album is These Hands by Virtual - 420, but it samples a scene from a movie.
And it swears. A LOT.
I would like to make a clean edit of this, but the fact that it is technically background vocals doesn’t help, I’ve tried the tutorials, it removes part of the vocals, and a LOT of the music.
How can I remove the vocals, AND keep the music intact?
Is it impossible with Audacity?
Is it impossible with Audacity?
Yes.
If the Audacity tutorials failed then the YouTube “by hand” instructions aren’t going to work either. Did you try both Vocal Removal and Vocal Reduction? Audacity has two different ones.
The general rule is we can’t take a mixed performance apart into individual voices, instruments or sounds. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky and the wind is blowing the right way, you can get one of the vocal management tools to work, but even if it does, you usually lose bass and drums as well.
If you catch one of the YouTube people demonstrating how it works, you should know that it does work perfectly on that one exact song. If you try another song, it may not work so well. Nobody ever demonstrates more than one song.
Koz
That piece of music is very repetitive. Maybe you could find an expletive-free section and loop it.
Or censor the each swearword with this (vinyl) scratch effect …
(setq depth 5) ; the higher the number the less intelligible.
(setq period 0.25) ; the lower the number the less intelligible
(defun scratch (s-in) ; Steve's Scratch effect.
(fmosc 0.0 (mult depth (hzosc (/ (get-duration period)))) (list s-in 0 nil) 0))
(multichan-expand #'scratch s)
That actually worked, can’t believe I didn’t think of that 
But thank you for the suggestion! 