voice removal software

Can anyone suggest any software that will remove the vocals from a cd or mp3 track? my daughter has singing lessons and we are struggling to find backing tracks. I would prefer a program that allows a free trial before purchase as the couple I have found are rubbish.

Rod

 

Instead of searching for backing tracks, it may be worth your while searching for midi files. Alternatively try the file sharing services..... Can your daughters singing teacher not record piano accompaniments for her? I've never heard an effective 'vocal remover' The best supply of backing tracks are karaoke specialists. One last thought, lots of singing teachers use a series of books called the ___________ audition book they all have CD's with backing tracks. If you buy copy of the book you get the CD. What songs are you looking for particularly?

 

Removing vocals is virtually impossible, like lordsummit said, karaoke cds or midi files.

 

Thanks for the info.

She is after Beverley Craven - promise me. Apart from singing lessons, she also does threatre school. Twice a year they put on a production/ competition.

The problem with threatre schools is the woeful lack of material. Every other child sings something from a musical and mine likes to choose something different. After sitting through ten renditions of 'wouldn't it be lovely' (might not be the song title) I have to agree that a bit of variety is in order. The other problem is that she doesn't seem to choose songs that are standard karaoke. Last year it was effenescence (can be bothered to check the spelling)which she sang without any music.

Being twelve, she would consider a piano accompliment as 'gross', 'minging' or whatever pre-teens say these days for something not 'cool'. I will have to check out the audition book suggestion but I suspect it will cover the usual suspects.

I have another daughter a year behind and they are driving me mad.

Rod

 

I think Soundforge or cubase may do it. I remember distinctly a friend showing me something that did this a good 5 years ago, it did an admirable task on Massive Attack's Mezanine album

 

Promise me is in this one together with a backing track

Promise me

Glad to be of help

 

? That would take some amazing filters, you'd have target the many vocal frequencies exactly. Cubase doesn't do it, all that does is crash . You can cut down certain bits but I've never seen anything that could ever remove any element of a mixed track.

 

What Cubasis can do is listen to a WAV or MP3 file and work out a beat and a tune from it, it then converts this into a MIDI file. It does edit the wavefile in anyway. As Anex said removing the actual voice from the WAV file is virtualy impossible. If you imagine a soundwave how are you going to know which bits are voice and which bits are music? Since it is not multimedia and voice and music is recorded in exactly the same channel its impossible. No doubt in the future we will see multimedia records which let you split the sound and audio track etc.

 

Multi-track.
I doubt that it would require huge amounts of storage space and software in the reply device to mix it all for no real gain. And record companies would make you pay for every play if they had their way.
Its not impossible to remove, theoretically you could look for common speech elements such as noise, onset time, transients such as plosives etc. within a certain frequency range but it would be extremely difficult.

 

Yep, but it would take away some of the music as well wouldn't it? I guess this is why it would be very difficult to do.

Nigel Blackie (I think you will probably know him) was telling us about this new MPEG21 standard which will let you search video content for sound and audio. You will be able to spit the audio and sound up really easily which will make it truely multimedia.

 

you can do it with cool edit pro,most lead vocals are mixed centerally,so its just a matter of removing anything thats exatly the same on both the left and right channels.sounds simple,but the results are varible and it can take a lot of buggering about to get it sounding reasonable

 

That sounds a bit like a noise reduction filter where you remove noise by give the filter a file which contains a noise sample the same as the one you want to remove.

 

I remember trying to do the inverse (get vocals from music) and it's bloody awkward. We used cooledit, but this was YONKS ago...

Beverley Craven? Woah - blast from the past (and I had a HUGE crush on her at the age of 16!). I was playing the first album only a couple of days ago funnily enough - I got a vinyl copy for £1 and it CREAMS the CD version - miles ahead! I also have a 3inch CD single of "Promise me" - I love those ickle discs!

 

Thanks for all the replies. The link to the cd backing tracks was especially useful.

Re Beverley Craven, I didn't know she had recorded two albums, I had assumed she had sunk without trace after the first. My copy is on vinyl. I ended up having to download an mp3 as my daughter wanted it played over and over again. She didn't seem to understand that replaying a track on vinyl wasn't as simple as pushing repeat.

Rod