Extracting Acapella & Instrumental

[TimbaLanD]

Anyone here know how to separate out acapella and the instrumental from an audio track? Is it possible?

[MyThai]

There is a codec available from winamp. This particular codec cancels vocals, I don't believe the reverse is also true.

 

The codec isn't perfect but atleast it's something.

[Pangloss]

Most music is made available in stereo, which only provides a left and right channel, so any kind of filtering would be very inexact, since the "digital" information is really just snapshot-sampling of standing wave forms at specific moments in time.

 

It's really quite sad how far behind the times the music industry is. And quite amazing how much better most music sounds when embedded in a Dolby Digital or DTS movie soundtrack on DVD. I keep hoping the music industry wakes up, but then I notice all the people running around with iPod earbuds jammed in their ears and am forced to remind myself that most people simply don't care.

[Royston]

Anyone here know how to separate out acapella and the instrumental from an audio track? Is it possible?

 

Was there a particular track you had in mind, there are places you could probably download the acapella version.

 

You'd certainly need something better than a media player if you want proper results, cooledit or some similar mastering suite. I use wavelab, which is ok, but I think it's quite tricky, obviously you need to isolate the frequencies of the vocals. So I guess you'll need a spectrum analyser so you can view the signal, look up the vocal range (I think it can be anywhere between 80 Hz to 1.1 Khz) apply filters and EQ, to get the signal roughly in that range, and most probably a noise gate and compression to clean the signal up. There's probably a better way of achieving it...have a browse on a good sound engineering forum.

 

Never tried it, but IIRC there are some mastering suites that may have this as a preset, not sure how good the results are.

[Royston]

found this....http://www.musicmorpher.com/free-tutorials-project12.htm

 

So yeah, almost exactly the same process as I described above <self gratifying grin>

[John Cuthber]

The old fashioned approach was to take the sum of the left and right channels which is usually mainly the vocals or the difference between the 2 channels which is largely everything else. Of course this only gives you a mono signal for each and it relies on the idea that the singer is in the middle of the stage.

[Royston]

A sound engineering friend visited briefly at the weekend, and he said the best type of filter to use for isolating the frequencies is a 'comb' filter. You could probably get one as a VST (or similar) plug-in.

[TimbaLanD]

A sound engineering friend visited briefly at the weekend, and he said the best type of filter to use for isolating the frequencies is a 'comb' filter. You could probably get one as a VST (or similar) plug-in.

 

Snail, well basically, I am trying to mix 2 songs. A friend of mine is getting married and she wants a unique song to be played at her wedding for the first dance. She originally had Brian Adams, “Everything I do” in mind but after listening to Brandy’s version, She couldn't make up her mind anymore! So I told her that I might be able to mix them both as they are doing a duet! I tried this on my media player and it was good but to get a good mix i need both acapellas and instrumentals! How do you suggest i do this? & yes, she is only a FRIEND!

[Royston]

Snail, well basically, I am trying to mix 2 songs. A friend of mine is getting married and she wants a unique song to be played at her wedding for the first dance. She originally had Brian Adams, “Everything I do” in mind but after listening to Brandy’s version, She couldn't make up her mind anymore! So I told her that I might be able to mix them both as they are doing a duet! I tried this on my media player and it was good but to get a good mix i need both acapellas and instrumentals! How do you suggest i do this? & yes, she is only a FRIEND!

 

Well, I guess the only way you could do it, is get a mastering package or application (see earlier link) that can deal with extracting vocals. I'm not really an expert in this area, I've never needed to do it. That seems a bit costly for a one-off. There are sites (ahem) that you may be able to download the accapella version, I've found accapella's where it's clearly a homestudio effort, but they'll be more than adequate for your needs, however you'd need the backing music as well, so that's only half the problem rectified, but you could always have a browse for that too.

 

Other than that, I'm not really sure, you could use a package like Ableton, and mix the tracks together (you can get really good results with Ableton) where you can add plug-ins et.c, but again that will be more expense.

[TimbaLanD]

Thanks Snail!! I'll search the NET!