Kareoke

That kind of audio tampering is very hard to do... In the Macintosh world, there used to me an mp3 player named SoundJam that had a mode on it that greatly reduced the volume of the lead vocal so you could sing over it. It didn't work on every song, but it was surprisingly good. Unfortunately for those of us who enjoyed that feature, Apple bought SoundJam, reworked the software and gave it away as iTunes -- minus that feature.

On the Windows side of things, I don't know what is available, but I recommend checking into music management software outside of Windows Media Player to see if any of those packages advertise a similar feature.

Unfortunately, you may have to go out and buy ProTools or similar professional audio software to do what you need.

 

I use YoGen (www.yogen.com)

It works alright but here's the thing about this type of technology, it only removes the audio from the center of the soundfield. It does not know what the vocal track is and remove that part of the audio alone. Most vocals and solo instruments are placed in the middle of the soundfield in stereo recordings. YoGen uses this to it's advantage and does an alright job but the resultant output is somewhat "thinner" sounding and still may have any stereo effects still in the output. If the vocals have reverb, echo, chorusing, etc on them (most have reverb), there will still be remnants of that in the output. This can be a good thing if it's not too strong, the new singer will have the original effect to sing along with in the background. Where this technology fails is if the the vocals are not recorded in the center of the soundfield. If that's the case, they won't be removed.
YoGen requires that you provide it a stereo WAV file for it to read. If you don't have one already, WinAmp is a great way to convert CD Audio to WAV files.

Hope this helps,
jim

 

SoundJam did exactly what Jim just described. It is very difficult to remove the vocals from a finished track without doing some serious damage to the backing track....

Nice explanation Jim!

 

Here's the website for "the" state of the art vocal removal device, the Thompson Vocal Eliminator.

http://www.vocaleliminator.com/

If you get it, please let us know how well it works. I would be intrested in owning one also but I'm not sure that it's any better than these software solutions. Maybe, somehow, someway, someone locally can demo it for you.