Freesound Forums

hey guys. new to the board. this site looks pretty awesome.

just wanted to know if anyone can help me out with this. is there anyway to isolate a sound sample from a song. say for example, i wanted a synthline from a song and needed to eliminate the vocals, drums, bass, etc. is anyone familiar with how i could go about doing this...if possible?

any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

Contrary to television and the movies, no. You can use "voice cancellation" software and equalizers to isolate specific frequency bands in which a majority of the intended instruments frequencies are found, however without the "master tracks" you cannot completly remove audio to isoalte anything with any usable results. Most sounds have components in a wide band of frequencies so taking out the bass drum would remove the bass from the synth. Taking out the cymbals would remove the presence or high band frequencies of the synth. You are left with a muffled and tinny useless sound.

The closest solution:

Find the MIDI file of the song you are looking for and mute the unwanted tracks. This requires that you have a programmable synth that can recreate the sound you are looking for... This is not actually getting "the sound" but it's the closest to what I think you are trying to do. Good luck!

There's a really advanced VST plugin developed at MTG which does something similar:

http://www.iua.upf.edu/mtg/audioscanner/

It doesn't always work, but it can get you pretty good results!!!

- bram

Hey Bram, those MP3 examples were extremely impressive... THANKS! I just hope their will be a version without the sweep noise. There does not seem to be a functional version anywhere? I found another one that you can buy and get functionality here: http://www.elevayta.com.