How To Remove Vocals From Music Tracks Using Audacity

How It Works

Vocals are normally placed in the “center channel.” Stereo tracks have two channels, but not all of the instruments are balanced evenly. Sometimes the bass is pushed more towards the right channel, rhythm guitar might be found more towards the left, and so on. Usually the vocals are put dead center, so we can split the stereo track and invert one channel. This cancels out the vocals but leaves the rest in tact. Primus often has extremely unbalanced channels. These kinds of tracks usually work well because the vocals are left evenly balanced between the two channels and that makes them easier to remove accurately. Songs with a lot of vocal effects may end up being mangled by the process, and songs with reverb may leave an echo despite vocals being gone.

On the whole, however this process works really well if you start with good quality audio. One of the most well known adages of audio editing is “garbage in equals garbage out.” If you start with CD audio and work from there, the end result will be cleaner and clearer than if you start with a compressed mp3. In HTG Explains: What Are the Differences Between All Those Audio Formats?, we went over different lossless and lossy formats, so make sure you start from a lossless audio file for best results. This isn’t to say that mp3 and the like won’t work, just that lossless audio works much better.

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