Removing vocal track from soundtrack

I'm a soccer mom who takes photos of my daughter's soccer games, pulls them into iMovie and puts them together with music. If I'm just doing this for personal use, is there a way in iMovie or GarageBand to remove the vocal track from a song? Is there some other software that can do this?

Posted on Oct 3, 2008 8:35 AM

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2 replies

Oct 3, 2008 9:59 AM in response to David Leslie

Nope; vocals are "baked in" as part of the mix: there's no way to "extract" a vocal from a recording..

..except that if the vocal's mono right at the imaginary 'centre' of the stereo, and the music's in stereo, you can - with patience, the right software, or by just wiring one of your speakers back to front and re-recording what comes out of them both - "reverse phase" one of the stereo channels.

That will subtract the vocal from the overall mix, and leave you with just the backing music - possibly sounding a little "thin" or a bit distant - and no singing! (..Kenny Everett, the Liverpudlian DJ used to do that regularly on the radio with Beatles songs to turn them into singalong karaoke tracks..)

So experiment: reverse the phase of either the left or right track of a stereo pair: you can select a left or right channel in the (..now..) rather expensive 'Sound Studio' and 'Invert' it..

User uploaded file

..but although the (..free..) ' Audacity' (click that blue link) offers the 'Invert' option, I can't quite see how to select just one channel and invert just that..

User uploaded file

..Maybe someone else knows how!

But this only works if the vocals are dead centre in the "sound stage" (..i.e; when you wear headphones or stand between the speakers the voice comes out dead in the centre). It won't work properly if the voice is also in stereo and spreads across between left and right.

(N.B: The dining room of the Hotel Valadier in Rome has one of its speakers wired the wrong way round, so Bob Dylan's lyrics and voice are completely missing when they play, erm, is it, er, either John Wesley Harding or Lay Lady Lay..?)

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Removing vocal track from soundtrack

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