Some people just don’t like Barbara Streisand. Sure, they say, she sings pretty well, but it could be done better. Not limited to Babs herself, but pick anyone. From Abba to Led Zeppelin, people excel at assuming they’re better than naturally-talented, expertly trained professionals. And we all know what happens when you assume: You end up really embarrassed at the karaoke bar.
So you want to be an expert singer, but don’t know where to start? I’ve heard “practicing” is pretty effective. The next time you wanna belt out the latest iPodsphere hit, practice on your own with the homemade karaoke version of the song. Remove lyrics and vocals from music for free with little effort.
Or go the other way. Say you want to create an a cappella song. You can take an MP3 song or CD track and remove the background music, leaving behind just the singer’s voice.
These techniques work pretty well, though remember vocal extraction is very difficult and far from a science. It’s more interpretive dance, and sometimes the dancers flail and hop about too much. Removing vocals or music from a blended audio file is difficult to automate, and very time consuming and imprecise when editing manually. Trickier than separating salt and pepper, removing vocals from music is more like unscrambing an audio egg. Unless you buy very specialized equipment, results won’t be perfect. And your results will vary depending on the music you choose.
You can use the free trial version of “Music Morpher Gold” to remove voices or background music from a song. It’s $100 if you decide to keep it, so definitely try before you buy.
Download and follow the instructions to remove the music from a song, leaving vocals. Or remove the song vocals, leaving the music.
Another completely free audio editor is “Audacity“. While Audacity can’t easily remove background music, use the instructions to remove vocals and create a karaoke track. Or see more Audacity questions and answers at the Audacity Q&A.
Make sure your music was recorded in stereo. Trying to manipulate mono recordings works poorly or not at all. You also want your music to have high “audio contrast”: Some songs have music with tones too similar to the human voices, and therefore are harder to remove vocals or create a cappella versions. Use songs with music easily distinguishable from human voices. For example, rock and roll works well, but Motown does not. (Further supporting my theory that Weird Al Yankovic is better than Smokey Robinson.