removing vocals ripped off of youtube

[samsung831]

So I'm trying to learn a song on the guitar, and I ripped a cover of a song. I used the "what you hear" recording and split up the files into stereo left and stereo right. I inverted it and I'm still getting the vocals. In fact I think the guitar playing and the vocals both got inverted. Can someone provide me a solution? thanks.

[waxcylinder]

See: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php? ... al_Removal

[samsung831]

which case am I following?

[samsung831]

i tried case one, vocal is still there.

[steve]

i tried case one, vocal is still there.

That method removes mono sound that is panned to the centre of the mix. It works in such cases because that sound (hopefully but not necessarily the vocal) is identical in both left and right channels, so inverting one channel and mixing with the other will "cancel out" the centre.

Limitations:
For complete removal the vocal must be exactly the same in both left and right channels (bit perfect).
Reverb and other spacial effects reduce the effectiveness.
MP3 encoding reduces the effectiveness.
Any sound that is panned centre (not just vocal) will be removed.

If that does not work then your only chance is to use one of the more sophisticated effects such as Knockout, VoiceTrap or ExtraBoy. Still no guarantees that you will get usable results.

[kozikowski]

And it fails completely if the whole show is in mono, which some shows do to save space on YouTube. Almost all NPR downloaded radio shows are in mono.

Vocal Removal is a nice idea, but it rarely works like everybody is expecting it to.

Koz