Audacity Forum

I'm new to this program, and new to sound editing in general. Ive learned how to use some basic features with Audacity and have downloaded various plug ins and played with them a bit.

What I want to do is take a Mp3 song (Aerosmith: Kings and Queens) and increase the volume of the guitar, without increasing the volume of other instruments like the drums, or even the vocals. I don't know much about Mp3's other than they are compressed WAV files. So I don''t know how easy it would be, or if its even possible to isolate tracks and modify them. Here are some questions I was curious about.......

Do typical Mp3's even have separate audio tracks for each instrument, that can be edited separately?
If not is there any alternate way to increase certain sounds by using an equalizer plug in or something else?

As a side note, I did notice that you can separate the left and right audio channels in stereo songs, unfortunately the guitar parts I want to increase in volume are in both the left and right audio channels, with most other instruments and vocals. There are only small differences in the left and right audio channels in this particular song. The song "kings and queens" has excellent guitar tracks throughout the song, but its hard to hear the guitar in certain parts of the song, so I want to modify that anyway possible.

I'll have to admit the first time I heard this particular Aerosmith song was playing (guitar hero). The game version sounds better in my opinion because the guitar in the song is much easier to hear. The game version sounds like the original, and is performed by the original band but the guitar in it just sounds louder and more distinct.

Any help is appreciated with this, hopefully I can apply anything I learn here to other songs as well.

mikenet2008 wrote:Do typical Mp3's even have separate audio tracks for each instrument, that can be edited separately?

No, all the sounds are mixed together like the ingredients of a sponge cake. In the same way as you cannot remove an egg from a sponge cake, you cannot separate out the "ingredients" of your mp3.

mikenet2008 wrote:is there any alternate way to increase certain sounds by using an equalizer plug in or something else?

Audacity has an Equalizer effect that allows you to cut or boot particular frequencies. Each instrument will produce sounds in particular frequency ranges. Vocals and guitars have a lot of mid frequencies, bass guitar and kick drum have a lot of low frequencies, cymbals have a lot of high frequencies, and so on. By increasing some frequencies, and reducing others, you can sometimes make certain instrument more or less prominent in the mix.