Cleaning up a primarily vocal track

[nmitchell076]

Hello all,

I am doing a composition wherein I am having a poem spoken aloud via speakers set up in the recital hall where it is to be performed, and then composing music to be performed live which reflects the mood of the poem as it is being recited.

Here is the vocal audio I want to use. It is Marlon Brando reciting T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" from the movie Apocalypse Now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKuA3iee4-c

Now, ideally I'd like to have the vocal track without any extra sounds. little sounds such as fire crackles and rocks moving won't hurt anything, but my main concern is with the sections that have the choir singing in the background and/or the ritualistic drumming. I would just leave them in, but upon thinking about it, those noises only really make sense when viewing the video and seeing the accompanying scenes of the tribes. With those, they add to the tone and the poetry, but without it, they interrupt it and take away from the message. As such, I would like to remove all of this audio with as little damage to the poetry reading as possible.

I have extracted the audio from the video using the YouTube to Mp3 Firefox addon. But I'm not sure where to go from here. I've tried "Noise Removal" and this worked a little for the chorus sections, but there was a little damage to the poem reading, and the results with the drumming weren't fantastic. Isolating the vocal track also isn't an option since the Mp3 rip is exported as a stereo track wherein both tracks contain the exact same audio.

So does anyone have any tips? Any at all would be greatly appreciated. This is a final project for me and I have months to do it, so I don't care how meticulous the resulting process turns out to be (assuming a solution exists).

But anyways, thanks in advance to any help!

[kozikowski]

You wouldn't want the MP3 file anyway because of distortions and compression damage. Yes, the clip is in stereo and the music parts do appear to have a wide stereo field whereas the recitation is mono and in the middle -- as near as I can tell.

The only tool that's going to do any good at all is third party "Vocal Isolation." Noise removal only works on sounds that are exactly the same from beginning to end. If the singers held precisely the same single note for seventeen minutes, Noise Removal is for you. But not singing songs.

I did it with my license for WireTap Pro. But I wouldn't buy it again. The latest version of the software is loaded with bloatware. You can try SoundFlower as a plugin to the Mac, not Audacity. It allows you to re-route sound from the standard Mac pathways and if you do it right, it lets you record internet audio.

However.

Youtube videos are already compressed and the compression damage may already smack your project in the head. Rent the movie and capture the scene from that. In fact, if you have a stand-alone DVD player, you can patch the Center Channel of the Dolby AC3 surround into your Mac and it's entirely possible you'll get the dialog only.

Koz