[NoxNoctum]

I have zero experience with any sort of music/audio editing and I just want to know --- is it possible to get high quality instrumental tracks out of lossless audio files? What's the best software to go about it? 

 

[Avro_Arrow]

There are software application that can do a reasonable job of removing vocals from a track.
As far as "high quality"...thats debatable.
 
Google "vocal removal".

 

[eshadeol]

Hope you found an answer. In audacity software you can do so , it's within the effects tab, mouse down alphabetically. Anyway - I found it does well if the particular voice to be "removed" is in choral or high stereo. It seems less effective as an effect if it's a center panned vocal.

 

[wakibaki]

You might try converting to midi, perhaps after removing voices. This is a way to take the instrumental character out of an arrangement, you can assign any voice (tone) to any melodic line, depending on the sophistication of the software and your preparedness to work. You can output the conversion as manuscript and edit that. I see some free software; google wav2midi... I seem to remember doing some of this in Cubase, or was it Cakewalk?

 

[lamode]

So did you try? How effective was the filter? This technology has been around for decades but I've never tried it (and I expect the technology has improved a fair bit too).

 

[BrightSOUNDLee]

Yeah i always wondered how you tubers uploaded instrumentals, i always thought they gained access to a producers leak of some sort. But vocal removal is something new to me seems interesting.

 

[tackytiger]

It's only possible by inverting one channel and subtracting it from the other.
 
As the vocals are often centre-panned, this usually has the effect of cancelling them out (along with anything else centre-panned) in the resulting file.
 
If any stereo effects have been applied to the vocals (reverb etc) it'll be less effective.
 
As for the quality, the mix is very likely to suffer.
 
It's usually called "karaoke mode".

 

[BrightSOUNDLee]

Is there any money in this business? I mean youtubers get payed for views when signed. A lot of youth love singing or rapping or covering over instrumentals. Seems interesting.

 

[MrRockliffe]

If you can get the acapella for the track, you can use phase reversal to remove the vocals from the track. Other than that, you'd probably need the stems (source file) so that you can remove it as a track.

 

[Ira Delphic]

Josh Tillman just released a midi/ instramental version of his new album "I Love You Honeybear" - called the "SAP" version, but it's kind of a joke:
 
http://www.fatherjohnmisty.com/sap/

 

[NoxNoctum]

  So did you try? How effective was the filter? This technology has been around for decades but I've never tried it (and I expect the technology has improved a fair bit too).

Hey sorry I kind of forgot about this thread! Yes I did try "Vocal removal", but unfortunately the filter just murdered the sound quality.
 
I'm trying to do this with black metal recordings which are not exactly the most well produced (to put it very mildly).
 
I'll look into converting to midi but (pardon my total ignorance here) --- how do I convert back?
 
I will try Audacity next. If anyone else has other suggestions I'm all ears. I might try to email the labels to try to get the stems but I'm guessing they have very real financial reasons why they wouldn't want to hand those out.