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Originally Posted by Hiram
My wife and I use Audacity to shorten songs for her and the dog's dancing routines (long explanation trust me) I was wondering if you can use it to take the vocals out of an MP3, if not anybody know of a good one, thanks.
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Unless you have access to the original tracks and can simply mute the vocal track, there really isn't a way to remove them entirely.
Depending on how the song was mixed you may be able to pull a trick to somewhat "remove" them, but for the most part it doesn't typically work very well. The way the vocal removal programs (or karaoke machines) work is they flip the polarity on either the right or left channel to cancel out anything panned in the middle. This includes the vocals, but it will also take out the kick and snare drum, the bass guitar, and anything else panned in the center also (which typically doesn't sound very good).
So if you have a mix where most of the instruments are panned in the middle, then you will remove most of those instruments from the song. If you had a mix where only the vocals were panned center, then you could probably do a fairly good job of removing them without effecting the rest of the instruments.
Another problem, is most recordings have some kind of stereo reverb on the vocals and other instruments panned center (like the snare drum), so when you remove the initial tracks panned center, you will still be able to hear the reverb from the vocal track and the other instruments. This usually gives the effect that the whole mix was "washed" in way to much reverb...
The vocal removal programs may also use some kind of filtering or EQ in addition to flipping the polarity... But the vocal range is way to wide to zero in on just the vocals, and there are many instruments in the same frequency range as the vocals (such as guitar, keyboard, drums, etc...) so it'd be impossible to remove the vocals with EQ or filtering.
So the results of vocal removal programs will vary for each song depending on how the song was mixed.
-tkr