Sort'a OT: Vocal Eraser plug-in...!

Jay Gladwell wrote on 5/5/2009, 2:07 PM

"Sound Forge Audio Studio 9 software includes the Vocal Eraser plug-in. Easily remove vocals from most recordings or isolate vocals. You can also use this plug-in to extract vocals from songs for remixing. The Vocal Eraser plug-in contains presets for various recording situations."

I never thought I'd live to see this. How many times has someone asked if it was possible to remove the vocals from song?

Anyone know how this is accomplished?


Comments

Former user wrote on 5/5/2009, 2:12 PM
I don't know how the Soundforge is doing it, but most of them work based on the idea that the main Voice of a song is panned center with the other music and voices spread across the stereo spectrum. So they throw one channel out of phase, which causes everything panned center to be canceled out, thus sometimes removing the voice.

I guess it this case, they can isolate the voice file from the phased information and play it only.

Dave T2
farss wrote on 5/5/2009, 3:02 PM
"How many times has someone asked if it was possible to remove the vocals from song?"

More times than I've had hot diners. It used to be sort of possible using phase cancellation as Dave described. With modern mixes though it's somewhere between almost impossible to totally impossible.
I once foolishly offered to have a go at doing this with a couple of tracks, the outcome even after lots of tweaking was really bad.

Bob.
smashguy37 wrote on 5/5/2009, 3:16 PM
It's impossible to completely remove a vocal track from a mixed song unless you have all the original multitracking for it. Once it's mixed down, that's it. You can only play with the phasing, but it'll never be "perfect".
Steve_Rhoden wrote on 5/5/2009, 3:47 PM


Well, you all need to give this plugin a try....whomever is curious.
Although we all know such task cannot be perfected,
i was really surprised as to how well this plugin carried out such task.
Rosebud wrote on 5/5/2009, 4:55 PM
You have some samples here :
http://izotope.com/tech/vocalremover
Jay Gladwell wrote on 5/5/2009, 5:47 PM

Thanks for the link, Gilles. That's actually pretty impressive.

Hulk wrote on 5/5/2009, 8:05 PM
As posters are stating the effectiveness all depends on the mix of the song. If the lead vocal is panned dead center with mostly mono effects it will work pretty well.

You can do it in Vegas by splitting the track into left and right mono channel on the timeline. Then phase invert one track.

Okay I just read the advert on this one. It uses the same principle but some added tricks to preserve the rest of the stereo image.