Audacity Forum

Okay.. i got an instrumental of a song and the full song.

How to remove the instrumentals from the song and produce a vocal only audio?

Thanks.

FIRST BLOOD

That's called Vocal Isolation and I don't think anybody's been able to get that to work yet. The main problem is studios keep insisting on remixing music so each version sounds good, making the two instrumentals non-identical. In addition, many people try to do this trick with MP3 downloads and those are really not identical.

But if you want to try anyway, import both songs and you should get one above the other. Select only one of them and Effect > Invert.

Press Play and that's what the cancellation sounds like. You can also use the Time Shift Tool (two sideways black arrows) to move one track in time with respect to the other to adjust the cancellation.

Koz

Koz is right, this will only work if the instrumentals in both versions are bit-for-bit identical. This is very unlikely... If you have access to the original untouched/unmixed instrumental, you usually have the unmixed vocal too.

For example, if you take a recording and subtract it from itself, you will get absolute silence.

But, if you record yourself singing/speakings the same thing twice and subtract those two recordings, something "amazing" will happen.... It will sound exactly like you added (mixed) the two recordings together!

So... When you try to subtract the instrumentals, the instrumentals will most-likely sound like they were "doubled". Plus, you might have timing mismatch issues.

And if you really play your cards right, you can get tunnel/rain barrel effects as only pieces of it cancel.

It's fun, but not effective if you're looking for a clean separation.

By the way, it rarely works the other way, either. There are fully formed tools to create karaoke tracks from vocal presentations (vocal cancellation), but most of them fail, too.

Koz