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Is there a way to separate voice from music?

Discussion in 'Audio' started by somps, Apr 19, 2004.

  1. somps

    somps Member

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    Anyone know a way to separate voice from music? For example, If I bought any old CD from the music store, is there a program that would be able to destiguish voice and music and be able to separate them into separate audio files if wanted?
     
  2. tigre

    tigre Moderator Staff Member

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    Do a searches for "voice removal" or "karaoke" here or click this link: http://www.google.com/search?q="center cut"&sitesearch=hydrogenaudio.org

    The trick is that in most recordings the (main) singer's voice is located in the center of the stereo image. By substracting the channels you can remove the voice. To get the voice only you need more advanced processing. "Center cut" dsp plugin for winamp/foobar2000 is the only free application I know which can do both (remove voice and keep voice/remove instruments). For center removal only there are several plugins. The results always depend on the source. Lossy encodings like mp3 don't give very good results generally (you'll hear encoding artifacts after processing) - and some recordings have the voice not located in the middle of the soundstage.
     
  3. somps

    somps Member

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    Thanx,

    I was aware about Karaoke songs, but didn't know about the other... thanx so much
     
  4. {TKO}

    {TKO} Regular member

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    i've tried the center cut thing and it sounded like crap....maybe it was just virtualdub, but if that's how most of em sound....don't bother
     
  5. musicfan

    musicfan Guest

    To seperate voice from music, you may try cooledit
     
  6. tigre

    tigre Moderator Staff Member

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    Musicfan, are you talking about using Cool Edit's "Channel Mixer" to substract channels (= remove all audio located in the center of stereo image) - or is there a special feature I've missed?

    BTW: Simple channel substraction can be done using foobar2000 too with this DSP chain: "Simple surround" -> "Downmix channels to mono".
     
  7. Lardzor

    Lardzor Member

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    Hope I am not off topic here.
    I am having a problem with the sound from movies. Basically, the voices are too low, and hard too understand. If I just increase the volume, then the voices can be heard, but the music is way too loud. I realize I can use a wav editor to selectively select the dialog I wish to enhance, but often the music and dialog overlap. Are there any audio filters that will specifically enhance the dialog, or lower the music, or any suggestions that might help me out with this current situation ?
     
  8. tigre

    tigre Moderator Staff Member

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    Yes. It is off-topic here. ;-)

    The reason is probably this: You listen to (AC3) surround sound on 2 channel setup, i.e. you only hear left+right front channels, but no center (-> voices) or rear channels.
    Get MatrixMixer Directshow filter. You should be able to use it for downmixing 5.1 to stereon on the fly on playback with any capable player like Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic.
     
  9. Lardzor

    Lardzor Member

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    Thank you for the response Tigre. I will see what I can do with MatrixMixer DirectShow Filter.
     

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