removing overlaying audio(dubbing)

[sjtimmer]

Hello everyone.

Somewhere on the internet it is said you can remove the dubbing in an audiofile. Audacity is not that complicated, but I don't have the time to look for the answer for the next 72 hours, and the internet has no answer for this, apparently. Does anyone have any idea how I should proceed?

[kozikowski]

If you saved the show as an Audacity Project, then you have all the individual tracks stacked up one over the other, backing track on top. Mix and match as needed.

If you only have a mixed track, that's the end of the world. Audacity can't split a mixed performance into individual voices, instruments or sounds.

Even worse, if you have portions of the session, you can't use that to reconstruct the other tracks through cancellation because of the wide practice of saving work as MP3. MP3 creates sound distortion and the distortion is different each time you make a new one. It kills accurate cancellation.

Koz

[sjtimmer]

I had to download the actual movie, save it with Windows Movie Maker as audio, online convert it to wav, download, and then open it with Audacity. I already saw that "overdub on/off" was greyed out, and had a V, so it's on. I don't know programs that well, I usually look up how to do it online.

[kozikowski]

I had to download the actual movie, save it with Windows Movie Maker as audio

So what does that mean? Is the real question back at the top that you wanted to remove dialog from a movie? That's a different tool.

If the movie is in Dolby 5.1, you can open it as that and split off the center track which almost always contains all the dialog. If it's stereo mix, you can try Effect > Vocal Reduction and Isolation.

Koz

[sjtimmer]

Not dialog, the foreign voice that is put over the whole movie. And everything I try with Audacity is already greyed out.

[kozikowski]

Audacity will gray many of its tools if you Pause instead of Stop.

Koz

[DVDdoug]

Not dialog, the foreign voice that is put over the whole movie.

The voice is either dialog, narration, or musical vocals (singing).

...Audacity cannot bring back the original language.

The Vocal Removal effect will remove EVERYTHING that's "centered" in a stereo recording. That is, everything that's identical an in-phase in both channels. (There is a filter for keeping the bass and the highest frequencies.) As Koz says, muting the center channel in a 5.1 surround track will work similarly.

So... Now you have a "useless" movie soundtrack with some remaining music and some remaining sound effects. Now what?