Hi, I’m a beginner in renoise and I was wondering how one would be able to take a song and rip the voice from the rest of the instruments? that way you could make remixes and stuff with it.
Thanks,
Jeff
Once the vocal has been mixed with the music itself and you only have access to the final recording, there’s really not much that you can reliably do to extract it. Once everything is mixed together you just have a complex mess of frequencies to work with, with instruments and voices often overlapping, making it pretty much impossible to separate them.
You might get lucky and find a vocal which is very different in tone/frequency to the music itself, which would be quite easy to isolate using basic methods like EQ’ing and filtering. Or you may even find a vocal that has been recorded in a particular way, which can be easily extracted using mid/side processing tricks. But there is really no golden rule here, and the results can vary a lot, even to the point of being completely worthless.
Taking these limitations into account, you can still get some pretty good results at times. A lot of people seem to say good things about Extra Boy by Elevayta software. This software allows you to work with a visual display of the frequencies in the sound, and then mask out the areas you’re interested in.
Once again, it really depends on the recording itself to determine how well this process will work. The audio demo on Elevayta’s page is quite impressive, but you have to keep in mind that the demo song chosen was quite “easy” to work with, since every element in the song occupies a quite unique and limited part of the frequency spectrum. It definitely wouldn’t work quite as well with a very noisy rock song, or any kind of electronic music with a lot of complex sounds overlapping, etc.
You can also try the Kn0ck0ut VST; I’ve only used it in an external audio editor - Audacity.
http://www.freewebs.com/st3pan0va/
It can pull the center panned stuff out of a stereo recording. Worked for me once a while back. Leaves fuzzy artifacts in the output - even when repeatedly tweaked to find the sweet spots.
GOOD LUCKS.
there was a plugin for cooledit (audition) or soundforge, i’m not sure.
this plugin was very good with removing vocals from songs. . it also did the other way around.
The plugins that use center panned filtering only works best if you have the original wave file. If you apply that on MP3 converted stuff it mostly doesn’t work because that stuff is majorily compressed joint-stereo. And as dBlue already said, it depends on the frequencies the vocal range is in. Whatever instrumental fall inside that frequency range, you also filter out of the mix which makes the left over freqyency range sound very thin.
I’ve used the Audition noise filter a lot of times to filter out instruments from tracks and leaving in the vocals.
In some cases a nice success but in many cases pale results.