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I'm working on a project where I desperately need the vocals removed from several songs. I've already tried the "split tracks, invert right channel, switch to mono" method, and it sounds god-awful. I downloaded a program that's supposed to be the master do-it-for-you program, and it failed horribly.

The best I can ask for now is some master audio engineer that -somehow- knows a way to help me. Anyone knowledgable in it? I can discuss details in a PM.

We run into this problem a lot in my business. Unfortunately, the only real way to do it is to be provided with the master tracks of the audio in question. Once it's all mixed down into one waveform, your options are extremely limited (if the stereo reverse doesn't work). Seamlessly removing the voice from finished audio is the "CSI enhance" of the audio world, for the most part.

If it's a song, you might be able to find a "karaoke track" version of it that has the vocals removed.

That's what I figured. Hoped I'd ask anyway.

I've looked for karaoke versions (which are all terrible midis), instrumental versions, which don't seem to exist, I've done the invert in Audacity, I downloaded a fairly advanced (as far as anything user-friendly that I would have a chance of using goes) program that go to almost-acceptable quality with one of the songs, but generated a pile of mush with the others.

I would love to find the master tracks, but I have no way of going about that. If they're not on the internet, I guess there isn't much I can do. I'd love to, like, contact the label company / studio / whoever and ask for the master tracks, but of COURSE they wouldn't give it to me.

If you have any ideas, please do suggest them. The reason I "desperately need" them is because this isn't a small "Aw, I wanna make a cool loop" personal project. It's actually going to be a fairly large thing lots of people would see, assuming I don't have to cancel it due to all of this.

How many tracks do you need the music for? Any chance you can get someone to do a cover of them for you?

I need about 10. If I could somehow find a band who were able AND willing to do covers, that'd be awesome. But I wouldn't even know where to begin with that.

What's this project you're doing and what are the songs you're thinking of using? Just curious... I might be able to help you... but it depends on a lot of factors lol.

Also, what's your timeline like?

Timeline is currently indefinite.

What I'm actually looking at now, if anyone can do it, is recreate the music under the vocals (which is apparently fairly simple because they aren't complicated beats), cut out the vocal parts from the original song, then splice the new music into the original song.

You might have some success with the audio equivalent of clone-stamping. Cut and move/mix chunks from similar sounding passages elsewhere in the song that have no vocals over the parts that do. Play with levels to double up the instrumental parts and reduce the vocals. If you get something that sounds sufficiently good, you can even invert the instrumental version and play it back to isolate some more voice, then take that isolated voice and invert it over the original to remove more. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's a lot of work, but if you can't just invert one channel, it might be all you get. It means a lot of detail work, though.

--Patrick

I'd thought about that too. Haven't had much time to try that yet.

I imagine in the end I'll have to give this project up, but before I do I'm going to at least make damn sure I've tried everything I possibly can. >=D