Keep voice, remove background noise and music

[China Sparrowess]

Well, you know how you said “Incase one year from now, someone stumbles upon this on google, I’ll post my semi solution.”

Here’s the thing. I’m looking to do the complete opposite of what you are doing. I have several clips from about 7 different movies, a short documentary, and a tv show with background music in which I fancy. I found your post extremely helpful, but before I go downloading anything to my computer, I’d like to know if you could help me out on a couple things. I take it since you have removed the background music out of some of your videos, you can do the same except instead of keeping the vocals and getting rid of the rest, you can keep the background music and get rid of the rest. I understand the analogy that you cannot “Unbake the Cake”, However you can suck the filling out of a jelly donut without doing alot of damage to the pastry. I actually have been looking for a solution to my problem for over a year and I was wondering if you can help me.

Thank you so much in advance,

China

“Take what you can , Give nothing Back”

[China Sparrowess]

Well, I saw your post earlier on google. I happen to be looking for the same yet completely opposite of what you were looking for. I have some clips from about 7 moives, a mini documentary, and a tv show with nice background music in it. I saw your post, and I supposed since you found a way to get rid of everything except the voice in some clips, maybe you can help me get rid of everything except the background music. If you could, please tell me what program would work best (Adobe Audition Most Likely, what video file (WMv, avi, etc…) or audio file (Mp3, Wma, wtc) did u use and the process that would be best to remove the vocals and background noise. I have knowledge of the whole “You can’t unbake a cake” anology, however “you can suck the filling out of a jelly donut without doing alot of damage”. I actually have been looking for a solution to this problem for a little over a year. Please help me. Thanks in Advance,

China

“Take what you can , Give nothing Back”

[Ryan Moyer]

I am a pretty novice user of Audition (I’m actually a video guy and just use Audition for some of the audio stuff when I don’t have someone else to do it for me), however from my experience the route you’re looking to go (remove vocals, keep background music) is much easier than the route I was looking to go (remove background music, keep vocals).

Audition has several presets for removing vocals from a track that work fairly well. It does not have any presets to remove everything EXCEPT vocals (which is what I was trying to do).

I don’t have the program with me right now so I don’t recall exactly where they are, but a quick google for adobe audition remove vocals should turn up lots of results.

As with everything though, your actual results are going to be very hit or miss dependent on the track you’re using. Some tracks it can pull out the vocals without you even being able to tell they were ever there in the first place (rare), and some tracks it makes the thing sound worse than it did when the vocals were in there. Usually, it falls somewhere in between. If you’ve had trouble removing the vocals with other programs, I’m not sure that Audition is going to be able to do much better than them, though like I said, the presets do exist in the program.

[China Sparrowess]

Are you able to put the video file itself into Audition, or do you need to extract the audio file, as I’ve been told?

“Take what you can , Give nothing Back”

[Ryan Moyer]

I don’t believe you can pull the whole video file in.

I was doing my editing work in Sony Vegas. From there I just set Audition as the default audio editor, then I could right click on the audio portion of my clip and I would be presented with “edit in adobe audition”, which would open up the audio file in audition and any changes I saved there were automatically converted into my Sony Vegas project.

[China Sparrowess]

Would it be smart to convert the video directly into an mp3 or should I use something like AV Video Morpher?

“Take what you can , Give nothing Back”

[China Sparrowess]

Okay,

I attempted to download and use the program Adobe Audition. Well found the channel extractor and the presets that you talked about, however, I only had the trial version of Audition and those commands were not available at that point. I’m not as financially equipped to buy that program right now, however when the time comes, I will buy it, but until then, do you know of any other programs that will do the commands that Adobe Audition wouldn’t let me?

China Sparrowess

“Take what you can , Give nothing Back”

[Robert Romeo]

Hi guys

Try this

Using Audacity
Step
1

Find a few seconds of audio that only contains the background noise you want to remove, and nothing else. You can usually find this sound at the beginning or end of the audio file.
Step
2

Find the selection tool in the Audacity tools tool bar (it looks like a letter I) and click on it. Using your mouse, click and drag over the selection of audio on the waveform audio file (WAV) that has only the background noise. Make use you only select the noise, and not any sounds you want to remain in the file when you are finished.
Step
3

Select “Effect” from the top menu, and then scroll down to “Noise Removal.”
Step
4

Click on the “Get Noise Profile” button on the “Noise Removal” tool screen. It will use the selected piece of the file, and attempt to remove as much of this noise as possible.
Step
5

Select the entire file. You can do this by clicking “Ctrl-A,” or by clicking with your mouse on the left-hand side of the WAV, beneath the name of the file. Select the entire WAV form.
Step
6

Go back and select “Effect/Noise Removal” again. You can change the settings, such as “Noise Reduction” and “Frequency Smoothing” using the sliders. You can click the “Preview” button to hear the differences. When you are satisfied, click the “OK” button.
Using Adobe Audition
Step
1

Select a section of noise that is at least half a second long.
Step
2

Select “Effects” from the top menu, and then scroll to “Restoration” and click on “Capture Noise Reduction Profile.”
Step
3

Highlight the entire WAV from in the main screen to remove noise from the whole file.
Step
4

Select “Effects/Restoration/Noise Reduction.” You can experiment with the settings until you are satisfied.
Step
5

Save your file.
Using GarageBand ’09
Step
1

Import your file.
Step
2

Open the “Track Info Pane.” Select the “Edit” tab and click the “Click here to add an effect” button.
Step
3

Select “Speech Enhancer” from the GarageBand effects menu.
Step
4

Select your microphone type and voice type (male, female) and the level of noise reduction you desire.
Step
5

Save and export your file.

[Stanley Dilley]

Thanks for replying. That should help with those dealing with a recording, but for removing background noise and music from TV for us old guys, its not a real solution.

[Mark Keeler]

Garage only works on a Mac doesn’t it? Anyway I did watch one of the video’s on YT with this approach, but the results were, to be honest, quite horrendous.