Is leftover noise in an acapella completely unavoidable even when I use an official instrumental?

Question

I have a song and its official instrumental that came from the same CD. I had a friend rip FLAC files from it, and I converted them both to WAV so I could work with them in Audition.

I inverted the instrumental and aligned the wavelengths as closely as possible so I could isolate the vocals.The background music is a lot quieter, but it's not as quiet as a want it. This happens a lot when I isolate vocals, but the background music is just a little bit louder than I'm used to. In general, is having background noise in your edited acapella tracks completely unavoidable?

Here is a segment of the song and its uninverted instrumental with no vocals, completely aligned as far as I can tell. I noticed that there was a very slight difference in the amplitudes, and I'm guessing that's why there's some leftover noise? Is it too small to fix?

Bob Howes · Accepted Answer

If your two versions are absolutely identical down to the sample then your method should work. However, even the tiniest differences in timing or audio level will result in an imperfect process.

It may be that the official instrumental is slightly different in level or mix to the vocal version. The other thing that occurs is that the conversion from CD to FLAC to Wave might be introducing some minor changes even though it's supposedly lossless. Maybe you could try ripping directly to wave without the intervening stage.

angeladachi · Answer

Thank you two so much for your speedy answers!

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