At school I have access to Adobe Audition and I was wondering if anyone here can tell me how to use Adobe Audition to take and MP3 and rip off the lyrics so that only the melody (just the music) is left? Is it better to uncompress the MP3 with Adobe Audition or another program and use LAME to encode it? or just use Audition to do everything? Also how do I turn the stereo file to a mono file? I also want to cut off the song at about the 20~30 seconds mark. If anyone here is able to help, that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

You might be able to do this with some phase reversal stuff, and filtering, but it depends on what you're working with. Most music is recorded so that the lyrics are dead center, while other instruments are off to the sides a bit. If it is the case that the lyrics aren't centered, you might have better luck by trying to equalize it out a bit. You'll never completely get rid of the lyrics, especially if there is any echo or effects applied after recording.

For CoolEdit/Audition, you can try AnalogueX's vocal remover DirectX plugin.
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio/vremover.htm

Good luck!

The only way I know to eliminate (at least most) of the vocals from a track is to invert mix the two channels to mono. Load the stereo file, select Edit-->Convert Sample Type..., then click on "mono" and set the left mix to 100% and the right mix to -100% (if the result clips you might want to reduce the mix levels, or do the whole thing in 32-bit and normalize at the end).

You might get a little better result converting with Lame, but the result is not going to be that great anyway. For one thing, mixing the channels like this doesn't do much for the track's quality and you will also be transcoding.

There might be plugins that do a better job of eliminating vocals. Do a search...

Effects -> Filters -> Central Channel Extractor

Yes in Adobe Audition 1.5 the central channel extractor should remove more, if not all, the vocals from a song (if the song was recorded normally). If they didn't use the central channel for vocals this will be harder to remove.

But it works for many songs I have tried it with. You can change the amount of vocal reduction in the Audition settings to remove most/all of the vocal(s) without damaging too much of the music.

wut?? are u saying u can strip out the song to make it instrumental?

i thought u need a mixer (hardware stuff) to do that?

You could talk nicely to the company that owns the original studio masters, pay them lots of money, and possibly get a copy mixed without vocals.

Or you could phone all the musicians that you know, and recreate the track from scratch, and worry about licensing later. That's what the karaoke companies do.

Yes, Adobe Audition beginning at version 1.5 has this feature added to remove center channel vocals from recordings. You usually can remove all or most of the vocal part if they were recorded using vocals in the center channel of the song, leaving the instrumental version of the song fairly intact (for karaoke or making background tracks for music, etc.). This depends to a great extent on how the original master was recorded.

Or else as the above poster suggested, you can have a musician make a similar sounding background track and pay mechanical licensing fees for use of the song or license the original master recording (if they will allow you) for usually big bucks.

Oh yes. How to do you think they make those mash-ups / bootlegs (you know, like the ones that 2 Many DJs popularised)? Just have a look at at Get Your Bootleg On.


See here - you might find arcade2600's post particularly useful.

haha guys I only want to make ringtones for my phone. I'm not about to pay them thousands of dollars for a ringtone. I'm sure the quality wouldn't matter because it's coming out of my phone speaker. Thanks, I'll give it a shot .

Oh, damn, I thought you were doing some crazy remixing for a pro DJ session compilation demo mixtape or something. A ring tone... sheesh.

Does your phone support MIDI? Maybe you could just get a MIDI version of the song? Of course, my phone is nearly two now, so it (a Motorola i95cl) Is almost as obsolete as those old shoebox sized-phones. It only plays MIDI, and not those fancy EMpee three thingamajiggers.

NICE.....imma experiment with this. woot woot now i can make instrumentals!! no more getting instrumentals from other sources?


quick question....can i do the same, but for making acapellas?

Well it's not foolproof. It won't work all the time.

Yes, just reverse the process.