Audacity Forum

Hi Guys,

I was wondering if you can add this suggestion.

I know you can remove the vocal track and leave the music or instrumental track in,

but I need to remove the music/instrumental track and leave just the vocal track.

I have searched for hours to no avail on how to do this, the only thing I can find is how to do it with Adobe Audition CC but not in Audacity.

Sorry if you can do this, I did search the forum first, still cannot find anything.

Many thanks

The "Vocal Removal and Isolation" effect can do this in "some" (but not all) cases. Note that this will only work if:
1) The vocal is panned centre in the mix
2) The music is spread left and right in the stereo field
3) There are no stereo effects on the voice.

Note that and musical sounds that are in the same frequency band as the vocal, and are centre panned, will remain mixed with the vocal.

Note also that in most cases, the results are not very good, or it doesn't work at all, because the above requirements are not met by the recording.

For more information, see here in the manual: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tut ... ation.html

know you can remove the vocal track and leave the music or instrumental track in,

You should probably stop knowing that. The vocal cancellation thing fails more often than it succeeds.

If you show up with a mono show instead of stereo, it doesn't work at all. If you arrive with a highly compressed MP3 (as from a download) the tools may give an odd damaged voice instead of cancellation and if you have a show with echo or reverb added to the singer (most likely), the singer may vanish but leave the reverb and echo behind. As above, even if the voice succeeds, the drums and bass may vanish, too.

The software has no idea what voices, trumpets or violins are. It's doing everything by left and right stereo separation. Anything that damages that separation will cause odd results.

There's a reason the YouTube videos showing you how to do Vocal Removal with the split and invert trick never do it to more than one song.

Until Vocal Reduction and Isolation, you couldn't do isolation at all, ever. So if that doesn't work for you, then it may not work for anybody else's software, either.

Koz