playback sound distorted and zippy

[bambam]

I have OS 10.5.1. I am using Audacity 1.2.5. I've imported a .m41 song from my iTunes music folder into Audacity. When I hit the play button, I just hear a high-pitched zip and that's it. What do I do to hear the song the way it should sound? (My goal is to separate the channels and remove the lyrics.). Thank you for your help.

[kozikowski]

Your first goal will be to get the song into a format that Audacity understands. The difference between the duration of the song in real life and the one you heard in Audacity is the amount of digital compression applied to it by iTunes. Audacity does that when it has no clue what the audio format is.

If you have QuickTime Pro, you might be able to load the song in that and export as WAV or MP3. Non Pro won't do that. Another way is to get Streamclip from the Apple web site and see if you can decode the song in that.

OS-X isn't going to be particularly happy with you decoding it's AAC files if they have copy protection on them. To get those you may need to burn a Music CD and then reload that.

Do you already have the vocal removal tools? You know they all give you mono orchestration, right? You don't get stereo music with no singer. The other problem is that software only works when the singer is dead center in the performance and has no effects echo added. Oh, and anything else in the middle, like drums, goes away, too.

This is harder than you think.

Koz

[bambam]

Thanks for your help Koz. Importing the song as an mp3 made a big difference. Now the song sounds correctly. I don't have any vocal removal tools. What do I need?

[kozikowski]

<<<I don't have any vocal removal tools. What do I need?>>>

D'Oh!

http://audacityteam.org/download/nyquistplugins

Search for Center Pan Remover.

Koz