Audacity Forum

Okay guys, I make fan videos, and I need to know how to remove the background music from the clips from movies and TV that I have on my computer. Please don't tell me that this is impossible, because clearly as you can see from this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvZu4J9THY4 it isn't. I tried to ask them how they did it with audacity but didn't recieve a reply. Please help!!!!

it is not practical with what you have
although you might get a partial solution
if you spent a lot of time at doing it
you really need the original recording tracks not a final mix

The YouTube show is mono. If the music is stereo, I suppose you could try one of the Vocal Isolation tools.

--Voice Trap
http://www.cloneensemble.com/vt_main.htm
--Extra Boy
http://www.kvraudio.com/get/1651.html
--Kn0ck0ut
http://www.freewebs.com/st3pan0va/

Koz

dnco13 said how he did it:

I just edited an ac3 audio track, and instead of removing the central channel, I removed the background music channel,

The ac3 audio track that he was using was a multichannel audio file in which the speech and the music were in different tracks. Opening up a multichannel audio file in Audacity 1.3.12 will produce multiple tracks in Audacity so you can just delete the ones that you don't want.

As far as I'm aware it is unusual for the speech and music to be on completely separate channels - perhaps it was a multi-language DVD that he ripped the ac3 file from.
Some DVD ripping software will allow you to select which audio channels to include/exclude when you rip.

If you only have a mono or stereo mix, this technique is not available and the best that can be done is to use the tools suggested by Koz (which will not produce results anywhere near as clean as this example).

Thanks for all your help guys. I'll just have to keep working at it. Cheers!