Create Instrumentals/Acapellas from DVD

[ehmjay]

So I know that in the past people have ripped Instrumental/Accapella version of songs by isolating tracks on their DVDs. Just curious as to how one would go about doing so on a mac? Anyone know?

I know theres tutorials out there but all of the ones I have found are for PCs (and rather outdated).

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[tomlee59]

I'm assuming that you want to remove the vocals from a musical track. There is no single method that works perfectly in 100% of the cases. The degree of success depends very much on how the studio mixed the tracks. If the vocals are panned to dead center, and kept there, then you have a fighting chance.

The basic idea is first to see what you have to work with. If by luck you have audio with the vocals on a separate track, then all you need to do is keep the tracks you want, and delete the one(s) you don't. I'm never that lucky.

Let's assume that you have a conventional, old-school 2.0-stereo track. If the vocals are centered, then just subtract one channel from the other. That will cancel out everything that it is common to both channels. Voice goes, bass goes, and you're left with mono. Audacity has a karaoke setting that will do this automatically, IIRC. The older versions made you do this in steps, but I believe that the latest versions have a menu option for doing just that.

You can get better results by first bandpass-filtering one channel (say, lower cutoff of 100-150Hz, upper cutoff of 5-8kHz), and then subtracting. This will preserve the lower bass frequencies. Audacity has excellent filters for doing all of these things.

I have relatives who are crazy for karaoke, and being the geek of the family, it's my job to do all this processing for them. I've done maybe 100 discs this way. I would say that about 2/3 of them come out ok (some ghostly remnants, but not too bad). Another third are simply hopeless -- the studio has added so much reverb and other effects to cover up a talentless singer that you can't make him/her go away to an acceptable degree.

And live recordings tend not to work well because of the performer's motion.

Hopefully, I understood your question correctly; if not, please post back. In any case, good luck!

[ehmjay]

Yes, that would be part of it. The other part would be removing instrumentals leaving only vocals.

I know that a while back a bunch of Michael Jackson fans managed to do this -- they used the 5.1 mix of the songs and isolated just the vocal tracks to create acapellas. this is what i was hoping to do, along with creating the instrumentals.

i wanted to idealy seperate each channel of the 5.1 so i could then remix specific elements and hopefully isolate clips and the like (say for example isolate just the highhat which would be in the rear left speaker etc.)

[tomlee59]

As I said, it really depends on how the tracks were mixed at the studio. If you're luckier than I've ever been, the elements you want to isolate are already on separate tracks. Then it's easy. But if things are mixed together (as is common), then your options are quite limited, and complete success is unlikely.