Sony Sound Forge 10 Vocal Eraser Plug In
When listening to the samples, listed in the 'playlist' here: - I was hoping the plugin could be useful sometimes. Unfortunately, no matter how I try, I'm unable to achieve similar results. Either the vocal is far from 'removed', or it's gone along with most everything else, leaving just the bass / drums section. Can anyone confirm my experience, or am I doing something wrong? Piotr (The plugin interface in Soundforge Aufio Studio's is very basic, so I have no idea how I could omit something, but still.).
Apr 9, 2013 - It is currently available in Sony's Vocal Eraser plug-in which is included. Movie Studio Pro 10, and Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio 9 or 10. The Vocal Eraser plug-in is included in Sound Forge Audio Studio 10 and can be used to remove or isolate vocals in audio files. The plug-in is also included in Sony Vegas Movie Studio Pro 10. Step 1: Select a suitable audio track.
The vocals are reduced substantially however definitely still there - it's a nice add on that isn't 100% effective. I plan on trying to use it to remove short sections dialog from videos where I want - to remove a particular comment without removing the background sounds - but haven't tried it for that yet. If it can at least squash dialog significantly that will be nice. All that said, my results pretty much match the samples in the link you posted - there's a faint residual of the vocals remaining - this is using the default settings. I have yet to see one of these gimmicks work well.
They certainly aren't designed for creating a professional soundtrack for a singer to use to make a recording. Is a much better option. However, be advised that some of the soundtracks are midi garbage and sound it. The problem with the company is that they don't tell you. You have to buy it in order to find out. The midi piano only tracks sound fine if that's what you want. Also, some of the orchestrated songs include the lead melody with the accompaniment instead of just the accompaniment.
That sounds fake if a vocalist sings with it. Again, they don't tell you. Astro lounge smash mouth zip.
In order to try and get ahead of it I went there because they aren't very far from where I live. But they won't even let you hear the tracks before you buy them. Their new website does have some samples for some of the tracks which is an improvement. While all this sounds very negative the upside of it is that if you do find tracks that are orchestrated accompaniment only they are fantastic and perfect for a singer to record with. You're almost certainly not doing anything wrong. Nothing that calls itself a 'Vocal Remover' is really a vocal remover. What they all do is basically to remove anything that is panned to the centre whilst leaving behind those things that are panned wide left or right.
They do this by subtracting the right channel from the left channel, something you can do yourself in SF without any plugins. The more sophisticated plugins have high- and low-pass filters to isolate the vocal range before they do the subtraction (so that low (e.g. Bass) and high sounds (e.g. Cymbals) that are panned to the centre are left intact) and/or some sort of pseudo-stereo effect to add back some sense of width as the basic process leaves you with just a mono track, but the subtraction of one side from the other is how the underlying effect works. If your particular track happens to have the lead vocal panned to the centre and everything else panned fairly widely then you may get a good result. As you can imagine, tracks mixed like this are the ones they use to demonstrate how well the plugin works.
But if the lead vocal shares the centre with any other instruments (very common) then you will lose those instruments too. Or if the lead vocal isn't slap in the middle (fairly common) you will only get a partical removal. Or if the lead vocal has been treated with a lot of stereo reverb (more common than you'd think) then you will lose much of the lead vocal but be left with a horrible ghostly version of the vocal. Etc, etc, etc.