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Being an electronics and telecommunication engineer, I know its not possible .. (practically When I tried to use frequency bandpass filter .. For every range of frequency I used to get the voice unfiltered (where as music gradually diminishes) ..

But I just want to know whether the world knows some trick .. ;)

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  • How about filter out the voice and then subtracting that?
    – Nifle
    Jan 27, 2010 at 17:47
  • There must be software out there like this fueling the karaoke industry.
    – JMD
    Jan 27, 2010 at 17:50
  • @Nifle, is there any software which gives such an advanced options? if you know please mention its name .. thank you Jan 27, 2010 at 18:04
  • @JMD, yup .. hoping the same .. I have posted this Q .. Jan 27, 2010 at 18:05
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    Actually, most commercial karaoke tracks come from the karaoke company either licensing the original tracks from the record label (minus the vocal tracks) or else re-recording the music in house.
    – BBlake
    Jan 27, 2010 at 18:06

4 Answers 4

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This app claims to do what you want Music Morpher and this also http://www.blazeaudio.com/howto/vocalremover/

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  • Blaze audio products are good and more effective but @high cost .. anyway I am happy with music morpher .. and power sound editor .. :-) Jan 28, 2010 at 6:31
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Technically, it's next to impossible to remove specific sound from a waveform containing many sounds. The problem is similar to trying to find which car the city pollution belongs to.

That said, 'voice removal' techniques do exist, and rely on a few principles:

  1. If you take any digital mono sound, invert (or flip) the phase and mix-it over itself you will obtain a silent file. (-5 + 5 = 0)
  2. If you take a stereo sound, invert the phase of the left channel and mix-it over the right channel, you will obtain the sound of the difference between the left and right channel (-3 + 5 = 2) or, if you will, the stereo content minus the mono content.
  3. Voice is usually in mono, while most of the music is stereo.

To perform basic voice removal, follow these steps in any sound editing software:

  1. Open a stereo sound file
  2. Open another copy of the sound file and swap the channels (left becomes right, and vice versa)
  3. Invert the phase of both channels in your second sound file
  4. Mix your second soundfile back into your original sound file (mix at 100% level (or 0dB) on both your source and destination)

You will only hear the stereo sounds. If the voice was mono and dead center, you won't hear it. Unfortunately, you will also have chopped off any other mono sounds which will likely wreck the joy of listening to it. Furthermore, in real life chances are that stereo reverb was added to the voice so you will still hear that, as well as stereo choruses.

You could probaly push the technique further, such as limiting the process to the normal human range frequencies so that lower bass and higher treble sounds remain untouched, etc.

Lots of fun, but probably not what you were looking for.

TL;DR The best technique remain to sneak into a studio, steal the original instrument recordings and remix them without the voice. And that's what they do when they release "instrumentals".

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  • I do agree with all your points .. thanx for sharing informative words .. +1 for the effective discussion .. Jan 28, 2010 at 6:30
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Being a producer of hip hop myself I know it's nearly impossible to do this without the original project file

I get begged all the time by dj's to send the master of the instrumental because they could not "filter out voices from the track"

The only trick I know of is looping which only works with short hip hop beats.

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  • thanx for sharing the info .. well.so this is written on rock, its hardly possible to filter out the voice from a music track .. +1 Jan 28, 2010 at 5:25
  • unfortunately not. but if it's a popular song and an instrumental exist on youtube....try video2mp3.net
    – Kelbizzle
    Jan 28, 2010 at 5:42
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I want to add up some important points here. It's hardly possible to remove vocal sound from a music track. There are some software manufacturers that have announced that they can REMOVE the vocal but it's not true. All they can do is (all that is possible is) REDUCTION of it. Some tracks comprise stereo effects on vocal too. That is the worst case we might have to face, because all we can try to do is COMPRESSING one part of the track.

All I did with the software I tried is band rejection of 50Hz to ~=4000Hz. We must have to have a compromise between the voice o/p and instrumental effects, because the more we try to reduce the voice, the more we lose the instruments in the track. I do agree with all the points written by mtone.

I tried my best. I could finally came up with some reduction of vocal effects in music tracks, but not LITERAL removal. musicmorpher, blaze audio products and Power sound editor pro, etc., are suitable software. :-)

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