Multiple Audio Channels

[wheelman777]

I was wondering if anyone knows of a software program that take a single audio file and seperate the different sounds like in CSI. Like if I wanted to seperate a car engin, a persons voice and other backround noise from one recording.
Or is that kind of software only avalable to the government?

[Cornucopia]

This comes under the headings of "Filtering" and "Sound Restoration/Enhancement".

Main ingredients: Your time, patience, expertise & experience with sounds and there behavior (i.e. you need to know what you're doing)

You can start out with many tools: Cool Edit Pro has alot of filters that could work well on material like you're talking about. But don't go looking for a single 1-button solution...

Caveat--
There is NO SUCH THING as a perfect sound extractor. Even for the government.

But with certain tools (read $$$$) you can clean up, extract, synthesize lots of material. For example: couple of programs can extract solo voice or violin line from composit piece of music, with quite good accuracy and fidelity.

Do a google search on "forensic", "audio/sound/sonic", "restoration/enhancement"

What are you going to do with it?

Scott

[alsyed]

well, those sort of programs are so cool on tv, they just don't really work in real life.

its similar analogy is trying to isolating vocal tracks from mp3's and stuff.

the best start would be having a sample that doesnt' change much throughout, and use that as a noise profile. then using a noise reduction filter that takes the noise profile away from the whole sample.

[wheelman777]

Thanks for the software reference and the serches to look for, I didn't think there would be an easy way to do it either (or cheep for that matter).

The main reason I wanted it was for a school project where I wanted to take out voices from TV shows and Movie clips and put in different voices, but I really wanted to keep a lot of the background noise as well.

[reboot]

those sort of programs are so cool on tv, they just don't really work in real life

Yes they do.
Any good audio program, with programmable filters, can separate any portion (frequency) of audio from the rest. Like an equalizer, turn off what you don't want to hear.
The more frequency adjustments, the more refined the filtering is.
A good 64 track recorder software would work, Steinberg or similar.
There are also karaoke types of software, that allow filtering of vocals, but I have no idea how good they are.

[Cornucopia]

those sort of programs are so cool on tv, they just don't really work in real life

Yes they do.
Any good audio program, with programmable filters, can separate any portion (frequency) of audio from the rest. Like an equalizer, turn off what you don't want to hear.
The more frequency adjustments, the more refined the filtering is.
A good 64 track recorder software would work, Steinberg or similar.
There are also karaoke types of software, that allow filtering of vocals, but I have no idea how good they are.

Look,
I've been working in the Sound Restoration/Enhancement and Forensic Audio area for ~10 years now, and unless your source audio is---
1. Already VERY high quality-clean, hi bandwidth
2. Very simple in terms of # voices, frequency spectrum, etc.
then you are going to be hard pressed to ever get a clean extraction.

Try getting a 96kbps mp3 copy of an acoustical analog cassett transfer of an answering machine message where the client wants you to separate the 2 or 3 (who knows how many) voices that are talking on the other line.
The noise signal is LOUDER than the actual message!!!
Yes, you can isolate certain sounds, but not at full fidelity, unless those sounds are already of limited bandwidth and dynamic range.

Scott

>>>>
edit:
maybe you should just say that programs will "work", they just won't "work well"

This area of computer technology is one that falls under the realm of AI and pattern matching. It is advancing, but not yet as far as many had hoped.

[alsyed]

yes i forgot to add this:

they just dont' really work well in real situations.

its the same with those video/image things, where one person asks "can you get closer and make that number plate clear?" and magically, from what i feel is an ordinary security camera picture at no more than 720 x 576 resoultion is now a superbly high res image for them to work with.

things like this can be done, the results are just very far from what they get on the realm of tv.