voice removing

[massimou]

When I use vocal remover with adobe audition I can still here some of the voice and sounds very weird. Any ideas what's wrong?

[housepig]

nothing is wrong - the vocal remover isn't perfect, it uses a method of phase inversion to cut out signal that's predominately in the center channel (the vocal).

but if the music isn't mixed like that, it's not going to remove all of the vocal, and what remains will sound artifacted and phase-y.

that method will work for some signals, not for others.

[massimou]

is there anyway to fix this? to remove the voices in files that are mixed that other way?

[devlynh]

Try a notch filter centered at 1kHz. That is the center frequency of most voices. There are other names for it also, but I just blew a buffer and can't remember any of them.

[solarfox]

massimou wrote:
is there anyway to fix this? to remove the voices in files that are mixed that other way?

There is no perfect way to accomplish this, no. If all you have is a stereo signal with the sounds all mixed together, there's no way to perfectly isolate and remove only the vocals while leaving everything else absolutely untouched. (Well, at least not on a personal computer using commonly-available software -- there may be some kind of specialized tools available in the professional audio-recording industry, but they probably cost an arm, a leg, and a few other major body parts...)

devlynh wrote:
Try a notch filter centered at 1kHz. That is the center frequency of most voices.

That might work for spoken-word material, since a speaker's voice generally only varies a few hundred Hz from the center frequency (though that still depends on the individual) -- but for stripping a singer's voice out of a music track that isn't going to work. The notch filter will strip everything, including other instruments, that happen to fall in that frequency range, and if the singer has a half-decent vocal range your notch filter will have to be several KHz wide to catch it all.

[lordsmurf]

is there anyway to fix this? to remove the voices in files that are mixed that other way?

Hire a band to play the instruments. I'm not joking.

[housepig]

what are you trying to remove the voices from?

if it's a song, see if you can find an instrumental version (like a b-side to a single) or a karaoke version - lots of remixers and mashup artists use karaoke tracks for songs where they just can't get all the vocals out from where they need it...

[massimou]

I just want different songs without voices.

[solarfox]

Actually, what you appear to want, based on your earlier posts, is to be able to remove the vocals, but otherwise have the song sound exactly the same.

If that's the case, then -- sorry, but what you want simply can't be done. It is not possible to perfectly remove only the voices, and leave everything else completely untouched.

[Kurt S]

And if you're trying to remove vocals from mp3's, forget it. mp3's have inherent phase problems thus causing really wierd sounding results. If you can get the original CD, rip the audio to a wave file and work on that, it will sound slightly better but it's still not going to sound great.

If you have the latest version of Audition 1.5, it has a center channel remover. That seems to work the best.

[VideoTechMan]

Or you can just ask the artist of the song to do an instrumental version

VTM

[greymalkin]

What you need to do is obtain the master of the recording as well as a medium to play/mix it on. You know..i'm sure you can find a 64 track mixer laying around somewhere. Then just patch it all in, find the vocal channel and drop it out. Then just mix it back down...easy!

this post was pointless i know..but just to re-iterate the impossibility of removing only the vocals from a mixed down track. All of the tools available will take out anything else that's in the same path whether frequency range or location in the stereo field.