Two Methods to Remove Vocals from Songs (Using Audacity)

Audacity is a very handy tool to edit audio files.  Lately, I've been testing its capacity to remove vocals from songs, using two different methods and obtaining mixed results.

The first method:  The "Vocal Remover" tool:

This is simple and relatively fast.  You need to go to "Effects" and once there, all the way down to "Vocal Remover".  Depending on your version, you might need to look for it under "Effects/Plugins/"

Once there, you run it, making sure you chose "remove vocals" from the drop down menu of the plugin.  And that's it! 

Vocal Remover will work well with some songs.  An important observation is that you need an unsplit stereo track for this method to work. What is an unsplit stereo track?  What can you do if you tried Vocal Remover and you didn't like the result?  Please read the second method to find out the answers.

The second method: Using "inversion" for one channel:

This is more difficult.  Stereo tracks have the audio in two different channels (left and right), and such channels are merged (unsplit) in most songs.  The second method consists of splitting both tracks and then applying the tool "inversion" to one of them.  Once done that, both tracks must be set to "mono" to be exported. 

That sounds a bit confusing, especially if we do not know much about sound edition.  Fortunately, several people have posted video tutorials.  This is one by Jimmy Ruska:

There you go!   The second method has worked better in my case, but it's a matter of testing to see what works best for you. 

Auralquiz: A Fun Game for Music Lovers

Aural Quiz is a small game that takes your MP3 music collection and turns it into a game.  It plays a short segment of each song and tests your memory by asking you the song's title or its interpreter.  If you happen to have a big screen or a projector that you can hook to your PC and good audio output, then you could even make competitions with up to 8 friends. 

This is where you choose the options:

The game looks like this:














Aural Quiz can be lots of fun.  It has, nevertheless, several limitations:

1.  It won't recognize some Asian characters.
2.  Since the segments played are random, sometimes you could get a silence as the hint for your song (if that song does have silences.)
3.  You should not use this game in competitive environments if you suck at recognizing songs.  It would be extremely embarrassing that your friends beat you up in a game that uses your own music collection!