Removing vocals from songs?

What is the best way to remove vocals from any song, or at least reduce their volume significantly?

Without a really powerful and expensive plugin, wouldn't you have to have access to the master recordings like remix artists do?

Extremely cheap way: precise equalisation.
Better way: getting a vocal recording that is exactly same as in the song, inverting its phase and merging into the original track.
"Expensive" way: looking up all the samples and completely recreating the track from scratch (without vocals, of course).

google the name of the song + kar

Open Audacity, load the song. On the track name on the left with a drop-down, click that, then "Split Stereo track", then select one of the tracks only and use Effect->Invert. Set both tracks to mono. You can play to listen to the result, and use Tracks->Mix and Render to reform it to a single track again, and export.

This basically just tries to cancel out sounds common between both the right and left channels. It *usually* results in the removal of most vocals, but this isn't a guarantee. You'll probably end up with some removed instruments too, it's an imperfect process.

The perfect process is finding the multitrack recordings of the original and mix it without the element you don't want. That is significantly more difficult, both in obtaining the recordings and doing the mixing.

Oh, and some audio players (like Audacious) come with the "remove vocals" effect themselves and you don't need to edit the file manually.

Audacity has vocal removal and isolation presets available now, too. haven't been able to actually use it for anything usable, though, but i had a pretty good result isolating the vocals on Enter Shikari's Dear Future Historians once.

also, don't you need a lossless version of the audio file in question when doing something like this?

Viscra Maelstrom said:

also, don't you need a lossless version of the audio file in question when doing something like this?

Yes. MP3 compression (or other lossy audio format of your choice) will typically result in very glitchy-sounding audio after the phase-cancelling trick is done to isolate the vocals. A high-bitrate MP3 like 320kbps might be usable, but I would expect it to probably still sound kind of crap after the phase-cancelling.

Using a lossy format for any audio editing tends to be a bad idea. With a small exception for splicing/joining audio without re-encoding.

GoatLord said:

wouldn't you have to have access to the master recordings like remix artists do?

Many well-known songs are recorded with each instrument as an isolated track, and some of these isolated tracks have been released somewhat inadvertently as part of music rhythm games (Guitar Hero etc.). Here's an example.

Fraggle, are you an SP fan? Funny you linked that. I play along to it on the drums all the time. JC is my favorite drummer.

I don't know if you remember me, but I was an EFnet #Doom2 regular back in the late 90s.