Remove or adjust the volume of background music in TV programmes ?

[CompVid]

If there's one thing that I hate about many TV programmes (especially documentaries), and some films, it's the background music.

For me, poorly thought out background music ruins many documentaries and TV programmes (not so much films as the composer is often more carefully chosen (presumably due to the big bucks involved in the production)).

I've trawled the 'net but can find no way to remove the background music (from, for example, a .avi file) - I guess understandably so as I would imagine that you would need to extremely intelligent software (ie, a person) to determine what exactly is background music and what is normal vocals and other 'normal' sounds.

Just thought I'd post this in the hope that somebody here might have some ideas. Even if I could substantially reduce the volume of the music, that would help.

Ta.

[jagabo]

About the only time it would be possible is when you have a 5.1 or 3.1 soundtrack with all the narration on the center channel. You could dump the other channels leaving only the narration. Other sounds will likely be lost too.

[CompVid]

Thanks, thought as much.

[jimhoofd]

There is software to do this. You need to know what the song is and sync it with the song in the video. then you can put the audio into some kind of "negative" channel so it will cancel out the song in the video. I dont remember the name of the software though but ive seen someone getting the vocals out of a song when he only had the real song with the instrumental song. hope i make any sense

[Bjs]

Any good audio editor can negate the sound track ... even audacity can do it but the issue is voice is generally across the band and removing the audio track can cause negative affects on voice.