Stripping from audio, but with a twist.

[Diana (Cda)]

I've been searching on and off for quite a few months now. There are tons of posts for people wanting to remove vocals from background music leaving just the music. I have the opposite problem. I need to retain the voice instructions and take out the music.

But I've seen tons of posts from all over the internet and forums such as this one and I know from all I've read that it's nearly impossible to remove the vocals to most people's satisfaction. However, I don't need anything fancy. It doesn't need to be perfect. I just need to remove the music enough so that the vocal instructions is still recognizable and the music silent enough so that an external music source can be played on top comfortably enough. And I'm hoping that removing music is easier than removing vocals (though I daresay it's all the same level of difficulty (??)).

These are fitness videos that I've made throughout the years from recorded TV fitness shows. The problem with these is that the videos are just fine as they, it's the problem of boredom that is the issue. I don't believe in going to fitness studios and my recordings are better than exercising without following a program. So my solution involves making a copy of each of the digitized old workouts, stripping the music then firing up any MP3 music I want when I need a change in the workout. Just changing the music is enough since I rotate through my collection for variety.

The only challenge is that I'd prefer to do this on-the-fly, if I can call it that. I can't afford the time to strip the audio out of all these AVI files, manipulate the wav, then insert it back in. I just don't have that kind of time. Also, I've not had good results with this method since no matter what, without major re-encoding, audio synch issues always seem to happen since we're talking about people speaking.

But is there anything that can at least do a half-decent job without too much fuss? Perhaps VirtualDub has more than one plugin to do this? I did find one thread that dealt with that but never could find the VirtualDub plugin they were talking about even when I dl the particular VD version recommended. And I searched for it in all the versions I have, with no luck.

Anyway, any help appreciated.

I've even wondered if we'd reached the stage yet where we could run a video through a speech duplication program that would internally use speech recognition somehow to re-create the vocals so that we could just strip the entire audio track from the video later. Then we could play any music we wanted as background.

But I doubt there's as yet software to do that sort of thing ... imagine, browse to your video, press GO, and then at the end you get a new output video with a robotocized voice saying the exact same thing as the original, but no music ...! Now _that_ would be kewl.

But, I'm very doubtful we're there yet.

But if anyone can think of a solution to remove background music from a video while retaining the speech, even if it's not perfect, pls post.

[filmboss80]

Feel free to develop such technology on your own. It is a bit easier to remove a voice from music, since a particular human voice is generally limited to a relatively fixed frequency range. When you have music, you have many instruments of varying frequency ranges that are constantly in flux. At different times, musical frequencies can even cross over into the voice range. Bits and pieces of the human voice might be isolated, but no understandable speech recording would come out, because you have to remove so much in order to get the music eliminated...even to a small degree.

It's a nice dream, though.

[Cornucopia]

I think your time would be better spent doing this:

1. Listen to the program and speak into a microphone and record your own isolated vocal track, echoing the original.
2. If you did it well, syncing would just be a matter of sliding the recorded track a little earlier in time.
3. Then, use your own music. Save as a WAV, etc., and then replace the audio outright.

Scott