How to remove voice from a music file?

The technical name for this problem is "blind source separation" [1] and is related to the "cocktail party effect" [2].

[1] http://www.mit.edu/~gari/teaching/6.555/LECTURE_NOTES/ch15_b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect

Commercial solutions are out there, but imo/e they're not always that great and the problem is of prime interest for researchers both in industry and academia.

There's not currently a plug and play solution that will work well on all types of music, but there's a lot of research happening in this area. If you're interested in digging into some of the cutting edge source separation algorithms there's a great python library called nussl that provides implementations of many of them. https://interactiveaudiolab.github.io/nussl/

Izotope RX can do a pretty credible job of this, although it depends a lot on the source file. This is a commercial product, though, so I'm not sure if it is what you are looking for. https://ask.audio/articles/isolating-separating-remixing-usi...

Interestingly, many years ago I had this start happening with my car stereo. The vocals were mostly missing but the other instruments were there. When it got to the instumental solo, the main instrument was missing. This happened on 90% of songs.

Turned out I had accidentally caused wires to come loose in the trunk, leaving the speakers wired in series, which caused the stereo channel cancelation effect.

A few relevant links:

https://www.celemony.com/ Celemony melodyne

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMEk8cHF-OA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL6ltnSKf9k

https://github.com/f90/Wave-U-Net

I have tried many options, and https://phonicmind.com/ has had the best results.

I've always wondered where karaoke bars get vocal-free versions of seemingly every track that would ever get requested. Do record companies make them?

I believe this is only effectively possible, not fully possible. Inherently, music and the voice will share some of the same frequency samples, since they are discrete. I’m sure you might be able to get a solution that works to the human ear, but I don’t know that it’s possible to perfectly strip out one or the other.

https://github.com/deezer/spleeter worth checking once

I spent some time researching this (albeit in 2014) for my wife. Heres the best solution I could come up with at the time: https://ojm.co/blog/using-audacity-remove-vocals-audio-free/

Voice is often at the centre of a stereo recording so invert the phase of one channel and combine?

There is a thread on the homepage that might be useful to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21431071

There are several products from Audionamix that might be worth checking out :

https://audionamix.com/shop-adx/

This is not a direct answer to the technical aspect of your question, but if you know who produced the music, they might give/sell you a version that is missing the vocal tracks.

Those interested in removing voice from a music file may wish to check out the many resources available at my website, monotoSTEREO.info (https://www.monotostereo.info). There is also a companion Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/monotostereo.info) where I post updates and related content. "Like" us on Facebook to follow the page for the updates! Be sure to check out the many examples on the MEDIA pages of the website!

Welcome to the rabbit hole that is the inverse problem.

I always wonder where DJs get the instrumental versions to sample/mix.

My date was sending me mixed signals, so I did a fourier analysis.

What about the inverse, isolating only the voice?

if its like talking, fourier helps !

This is a longstanding problem in audio engineering, along the lines of "how does one un-bake a cake to get the eggs?" There's always going to be artefacts and distortion ranging from unpleasant to extreme, hence audio engineers when mixing from stems/channels will do a stereo instrumental mix and a mix with vocals.