How do I edit the lyrics out of a song to make it an instrumental

[jbitakis]

What software is available to take out the lyrics of a song, so I just have the music part, to make it an instrumental.
James

[guns1inger]

I use Sound Forge and AnalogX's Vocal Remover. I believe the is a filter for Audacity as well, which is free (both Audacity and the filter).

Before you proceed, however, there are some caveats.

1. Don't waste you time if your source is MP3/AAC/WMA. The compression ruins the stereo field, and a successful removal only works if the stereo is clean

2. These filters work by taking one channel, reversing the phase, then overlaying it on the other channel. Anything that is the same in both channels cancels itself out. Usually the lead vocals are straight down the middle, but sometimes so or the drums or the bass. On the other hand, backing vocals often have some stereo reverb or chorus added to build them up, and this will not be removed.

So even with a clean source, you may find that you end up with echo of the backing vocals and no drums and bass. Every track varies.

You may also find that after using the filter you still need to play with EQ settings to try to remove leftovers.

You will never (OK, big claim, never, so I will drop it back to 99.99% of the time) get it back to being the studio tracks sans vocals.

[AlanHK]

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Vocal_Removal

[netmask56]

Another little technical trick some studios have used on their vocal tracks to prevent you from removing the vocal is a judicious amount of phase modulation on the vocal track so that the location is randomly moved a little off centre left and right. Not enough to be really noticeable on the average to good home systems but enough to prevent canceling out the vocal. In the studio I worked in we had an old Sansui QS encoder that you could "wobble" a signal plus or minus 22.5 to 45 degrees using their QRX Encoder vario-matrix circuit - it did the trick.....