Breaking 1 audio track to different ones

[apakhira]

Hi
In many TV Series like CSI(Crime Scene Investigation) they get an audio recording with only one track.Then they divide it into different tracks like Car1,car2,etc. through the computer.Is it possible?Which app can do it?

[BenDover]

Iv also been dieing to know this 2. iv got loadsa albums on my hd that turned out to be just 1 long track wich makes it pointless copying it to a cd. Surely there must be a peice of software to seperate em. Any1 got any ideas?

[cafetimer]

At least with extracted audio from a DVD (or any other audio source) you can edit (cut) the long track into individual tracks with Nero's sound editor. I've done that before and it works great.

[apakhira]

Oh!! I wasn't talking abot that.Dividing a long track into individual track can be done by almost any moderately powerful audio editor, like Cool Edit Pro, Sound Forge,etc.
What i wantto know is somethin else.I'll give u another example-
Suppose i have an audio track with music, a voice and drumbeats all playing simultaneously.Is there any way to make a separate file only containing the dumbeats or a file only containing the voice?How do i do it?

[Cornucopia]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Sorry, just had to get that out of my system. I don't really mean to make fun.

You want something that can deconstruct or "unmix" a mixed file. Like vocal removal on steroids.
There is research being done with this at universities and corporations and governments/military around the world (I ought to know, cuz I did this at and after university), and a few special-purpose algorithms are in existance, but the cheapest product is going to be in the range of $1000US, with most being up around 50-100k or more. Even then, it's imperfect and only does a few things or works on limited types of source material. This fits in the category of leading edge esoteric audio analysis software and hardware, along with audio restoration.
For most of us, it's just a pipe dream.

Time to try a different tack...

Scott

[tigerman8u]

thru a project i was working on i found out you can load an audoi file into Audacity. for myself i split the file into 2 channels (you might skip this step depending on your purpose). next i inverted the audio ( my understanding is the vocals are at the center of the channel on alot of recordings). i then saved the inverted file. when played back it was like a karaoke with no vocals. i think there is a guide on how to do this on Audacity's website. I will try to look it up and post it for you. hope this helps. ps Audacity is freeware. i also cut out app. 2 minutes of the audio file to run tests on to save time. then when i found what worked i used the whole file to do what i wanted. you can play the changes you make in Audacity to see if it's what you want, if not just click on undo. good luck.

[hech54]

I use CDWave....VERY nice program.

[theDruid]

@BenDover - try searching for mp3splt (no I didn't accidentally miss out the i!). It's commandline only at the moment, but it's a brilliant app with lots of different modes - CDDB support, silence detection and all sorts.

As for this splitting an audio file into its constituent parts - you can remove the elements in a stereo mix, which are dead centre in the mix (like removing the vocals in the centre of a mix, as tigerman8u said above) - I think GoldWave might be able to do this for you automatically.

Apart from that, Cornucopia seems quite knowledgeable about how far away this is - there's a reason why you see it happening in Sci-Fi etc..

cheers,
mcdruid.

[BenDover]

Im not very good at that command line stuff as iv only had a pc for a few mnths and just encodin video and sound has been a bit of a hedache 2 get 2 grips with, lol Iv tried usin nero sound editor wich looked better than i thought, But why is it none of these programs have a simple cut button? I can see where the tracks end cos of the waves in the display but i cant cut it, any ideas on just cuttin or summat usin goldwave or nero sound editor?