vocal removal with mp3?

[funkiemunkie]

i'm trying to do what it says here: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... _the_other (case 2) with an mp3. whenever i do what it says, the two stereo tracks i get both have the vocals in it, with any mp3. i tried exporting it as a wav and trying it as a wav and that didnt work either. i have no idea what a stereo track is, and ive tried to search to find out. i also tried the nyquist center pan remover, and that doesnt work either? it always says it returned no audio. im so lost

[steve]

The vocal remover works by "subtracting" one side of the stereo track from the other - anything that is dead in the middle of the stereo field, (such as the lead vocal), will be identical on both left and right channels. Therefore when you subtract one channel from the other, anything that was the same on both sides will be cancelled out.

This ONLY works if the vocal is identical on both left and right channels.

When music is compressed as an mp3, the stereo gets messed up, so vocal removal rarely works on an mp3. Even if you convert an mp3 into a wav, it does not "un-mess-up" the stereo, so it still won't work.