Freesound Forums

Is it possible to isolate a part of a song, like a vocal track, and mute the rest? Is there some software that can do this? Cheers

It depends on how the song was mixed... if it's stereo you can seperate the left and right channels, which may yield certain instruments. The common way to mix songs is to have the singer in the center and instruments off to the sides.
If a song is mixed in this way you can invert one channel and add the waveforms, effectively removing the vocals and whatever else is panned to the center.

More info: http://www.ethanwiner.com/novocals.html

It's tricky business though. Studios record instruments on seperate tracks and mix them down to stereo. Getting your hands on those is the only way to get the original quality.

Check out ccMixter, such seperate elements are sometimes provided for purposes of remixing.

This might sound very basic... and it depends what you want to do with the clip but as simple as "windows movie maker" you can lay the music track down and "split" it keep what you need and the rest....garbage! Not sure if this does help...but its the way that I would do it!

In around 95% of cases, you've got absolutely no chance of isolating the vocal, or nay instrument across a whole track from a completed mix, unless as mentioned above you're dealing with some David Bowie or other 60's-80's tracks with hard panning used extensively.

Unless you can make do with a very crude attempt at isolation with EQ and multi-band compression, your only hope is to search for the track as an acapella.

It's quite surprising what you can find searching LimeWire or other file-sharing programs for acapellas. I've found a few Michael Jackson tracks and other big hits with just the vocals, or sometimes the lead plus harmony vocals mixed to stereo. These can be great for white label remixes.