Thomas J. West Music

The folks at Sourceforge have been paying attention.

As anyone who uses Audacity probably knows, there are several YouTube videos that teach you how to use the web's more popular freeware audio recorder/editor to remove vocal tracks from a recording. The new version of Audacity (1.3 Beta) now has this ability onboard as an item under the Effects menu. Simply select all, click on Vocal Remover, and you're done.

The Vocal Remover feature doesn't perform flawlessly, because it depends on the way the original data was recorded. Vocal remover removes any center-panned sounds (voice or otherwise) from the selected region. Center-panned means that the data for those sounds appears identically on both the left and right channels of the recording. If your vocalist sounds like he's standing on stage left, Vocal Remover will not work. If the vocal is center-panned, but the reverb of the voice is not, you will still get an echo of the voice on the finished track. Also, any instruments that are center-panned will also disappear.

Vocal Remover is a great tool for voice teachers to take a popular song that students want to work on and giving them a practice track that sounds a lot like the original. It is not flawless, but for educational purposes, it is very useful.

Posted by Thomas J. West on March 18, 2011 at 9:07 AM

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