If you mean the Izotope's Vocal Eraser, it was packaged with Sound Forge Audio Studio 9.0 (it erases vocals, but can also be set up the other way around). Of course, once installed it also works in Sound Forge Pro.

But frankly, the results are miserable.

The expression you can't take the eggs out of a cake after you bake it also applies to trying to remove vocals from a song.

Mike

Dependend on how sound was recorded and mastered you can get this effect within Vegas without using filters. If it's a stereo signal with voice without too much reverb is in midth of the stereo angle:

- Double the audio track
- Split the channels (left channel upper track, right channel lower track)
- Reverse phase shift of one of the tracks

Done.

Marco

Thank you all. Actually, I want to erase the music, not the narration. I have the studio version of Sound FOrge that was bundled with Pro 9, I think. Would it be called "Vocal Eraser" or what?

You MIGHT be able to erase the vocals. If you can, you CANNOT erase the music.

The trick relies on the fact that mostly vocals USED to be recorded in both channels (the middle channel). So if you invert one channel of the stereo pair and subtract it from the other channel (you need to mix down to mono for that to happen) the vocals will cancel but the music will not.

The problem with trying to remove the music is it is panned over the channels, no way to cancel it out. There's a much bigger problem though. Today's vocals have all manner of audio magic applied, reverb, compression, chorus etc. So the aren't the same in both channels. Therefore cancelling them out don't work well to doesn't work at all to, you just get a horrible mess.

Now, I know, there's a question still unanswered. If I could take the vocals out of the music why can't I subtract the music from the original mix and leave just the vocals. The problem, even when you can subtract the vocals, is you have only mono (remember you had to do L + (-R) and when you try to subtract the mono instruments from the stereo instruments you get a mess, mostly you just kill the low frequencies.

Hope this helps explain a few things. I once wasted a few days trying to create a karaoke mix, using the above plus heaps of other tricks. I thought I might have a half decent chance at it because they were really old recordings but even 20 years ago people were doing funky tricks with sound.

Bob.

The fact of the matter is that I've never heard vocal removal done satisfactorily. I suggest that the OP should have better things to do with his time because any time spent on this task will be forever wasted.

John I have removed vocals that appear on both channels for an artist that couldn't
get an instrumental only track in time for a performance. Usually kills some
instrumental, such as bass in my example.

But I agree removing the instrumental is a waste of time and money. Better off
just having the talent come in and record them only.

...even 20 years ago people were doing funky tricks with sound.

That is certainly true, you need to go back 30 years to find more natural vocal recordings.

Or is the OP's problem with a voiceover mixed with music, where the original voice track is lost?

If so, we're back to the 1970s for style, with a centered vocalist.

It might be possible to extract the common signal and do some EQ tweaking to get a phone quality voice out of it.

You just have to weigh that effort against the effort of using the Retake Filter.

Jazzmaster,

It sounds like you want to extract the Voice from a narrated track with music, not from a song like a CD or something. Is that right?

If so, I don't know of any software that will do that. You might be able to filter some of the music depending upon frequencies, but you will never remove it completely.

Dave T2

That "Vocal Eraser" sounds like the voice is coming from a fishtank. But anyway, I'm wondering if changing the pitch could help isolate the voice for extraction.