Software for Vocal Splitter?

Id be interested in this as well.

Splitter? You mean you want to isolate the vocals in a music track? This is akin to taking pink paint and separating it out into white and red paint -- basically impossible except under certain circumstances which don't exist.

Well on Older recordings where the vocals are panned dead center is the only way it might be possible that I know of without the original tracks. Not saying it would sound good, just might be possible.

Seablade

I may be completely wacked, but I believe they do frequency filtering.

Human voices have a certain range, and they do an "intelligent" selective filtering on that range.

Which is why the music sounds a bit funny after it goes through that, since it'll pick up some of the music's frequencies as well.

Heh you are completly off probably.

I believe there is some VERY high end software that is used maybe in the broadcast market, I have heard rumors about it never used it myself and i have been doing Audio work for a good while, and all I have seen to show for it is rumors.

How it USED to be done was typically when Vocals were panned dead center in a recording you would take a stereo recording, invert one side of it and summ it to the other, the vocals would be 180 degrees out of phase from each other and would canel itself out, the problem is of course when you have instruments panned dead center, or really just not panned to one side or the other sometimes you get artifacts of them removed and are left with a weird sound And of course nowadays most pop music DOESNT have the vocals panned dead center

Vocal Removing software does a bit of both(Frequency filtering and phase shifting) I believe nowadays, at least the stuff you find in something like Adobe Audition, which is why it never sounds all that good when you run it through it. At least that is my guess having never really looked at the source code for it for obvious reasons

So what you would in the end want to do is take that track left with the vocal removing software, put it 180 degree out of phase(Invert it if you want to be technical as phase involves time) and sum it with the original track, I make absolutely no garuntees in as far as the quality of the output, in fact i would be willing to be it wont sound all that good, but dont have my software in front of me to check

Seablade

As Seablade points out, Vocals are usually mono and panned dead center. Hence they can be extracted and sent to the center channel if you use a Dolby Pro Logic type decoder. Because the sounds that make up the musical portion are usually not panned dead center, they can be extracted too. You can use an audio editor like Audacity to do that. PM me an email address and I'll send you a sample of that.

Center panned vocals are the "certain circumstances" which I referred to, the classic method by which the 'karaoke' filter on consumer stereo systems 'remove' vocals is as seablade described. But any professionally produced piece of music nowadays does NOT have dead center mono vocals. Reverb tails are one classic case which will mess up vocal 'extraction', and the other, ESPECIALLY for pop music, is doing things like thickening up the sound with panned and slightly delayed tracks...this also makes it impossible to isolate all the vocals. For messing around, well, maybe the results will be good enough, but it's impossible to isolate all of the vocals entirely.

I know of no such program that can extract vocals by EQ alone, as the human vocal range covers a large portion of the usable low-mid sound spectrum and will overlap any other instruments in a track.

Khu is right on the money, well except the human voice actually does use almost ALL of the range from low-mid on up(And sometimes into the lows). The Vowel sounds tend to be what you hear and is most recongizable in the human voice thoughb and that does happen in the low-mid range primarily, but the constanant sounds are typically made in the upper ranges. The vowel sounds are what determines the pitch of a note though or tone of voice.

Just out of curiosity Khu what do you do anyways? I know I have seen your name around a bit both on this forum and the Linux one I believe and your knowledge of audio above is intriguing to me, was wondering if you were another possible linux audio freak

Seablade