vocal extraction & bleeping

[mduong]

I dont know much about audio- but my friend asked me if there is any program that you can take a song into and extract just the vocals -- so you would essentially have an "instrumental"? I told her no b/c songs on CDs are mixed into 1 track-- they aren't separate components, right? The second question she had was, she has a song that has bad words in it, is there any way of bleeping out those words without putting an actual "beep" sound over the bad word (sorta like erasing that word from the vocals)? However, if my assumption for the first question is correct, then you cant edit out the bad words in this song either right? Thanks so much! :) have a great day!

[fischerm]

How do the pseudo karaoke machines do it? All i can think of is dropping out the mid range frequencies.. but it would probably just result in the vocals being quieter and less noticeable. There's no good way to do it I don't think.

[dcv]

There are a few programs that claim to do this sort of thing (I don't remember their names offhand - they didn't work very well when I tried them, so I didn't make any mental notes). They basically try to analyze the song, pick out which vocal frequencies are used, make a waveform that will flip the phase at those frequencies, and play that back as the track goes, trying to cancel out the vocals. However, most of the test tracks I used ended up sounding horrible - the vocals were made noticeably quieter (never did go completely away), but most other instruments were made to sound much thinner in the process.

That's probably how pseudo-karaoke machines do it - I've never thought those sounded too good either.