Increasing volume in vocals over background noise

[packman823]

I conducted an interview of a student regarding interpreting music. I would play an instrumental piece and he would answer questions. Well, in some places, the music playing in the background overpowered the student's voice. Is there any way to fix this?

[steve]

You can reduce the level of the music where the student is not speaking, but unfortunately not in places where the student is speaking.

[kozikowski]

How did you record the voices? Koz

[logbook]

is there anyway to separate the noise from audio

[steve]

The most important steps in producing clear noise free recordings are before and during the recording, such as minimising environmental noise, positioning the microphone to pick up the sound that you want and not the noise, setting the recording levels, and so on.
There are some things that can be done "post production" but the effectiveness is limited by the quality of the original recording. There is an article here about techniques that may help to remove background noise: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Noise_Removal
If the noise level is similar or greater than the sound that you want to keep, then it will probably not be possible to make much improvement.

[kozikowski]

is there anyway to separate the noise from audio

The short answer is no.

Live Recording is hard. It's actually worse because "everybody knows" it's easy. You walk in with your new recorder and press the red button. The video people have a joke that sound kills more videos than the video does.

Koz