Seperate voice from MP3!

[pofoener]

Hi,
is ist possible to seperate a voicestream from a MP3 File, i mean to cut the voice out and you only hear the music?
Is there a tool, which is possible to do this?
THX

[solarfox]

Not reliably, and not perfectly, no. It depends greatly on how the original source material was mixed.

Certain sound-editor programs, like Goldwave, Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition), and some others, have a "vocal cut" function which will try to remove vocals... but all it really does is invert one of the channels and then add them together. The net effect is that any voice or instrument which was mixed in the "center" -- i.e. of equal amplitude in both left and right channel -- will cancel each other out, mathematically, while anything mixed "off-center" will remain.

This technique does tend to work fairly well (though not perfectly) on older stereo recordings from the 60's and 70's, when extensive post-processing was uncommon, and it was standard practice among recording engineers to put the lead vocalist in the "center" and then mix the instruments "off-center", to enhance the illusion of the performance being spread out between your speakers with the lead vocalist "in front" of you. Unfortunately, with all of the heavy overdubbing and post-processing used in modern pop music, it's no longer a given that the lead vocal will be cleanly in the "center"; you'll typically have a lot of overdubbed echoes in the off-center regions that won't subtract cleanly.

[Kurt S]

Adobe Audition has a center channel extraction method that does not use the phase cancelation method and it can actually work pretty good on wave files if the vocals don't have any stereo effects on them. But don't expect anything good from an MP3. Due to the way lossy compression works, it will sound like crap. If you have the CD, rip the song to wave and try it.