Adobe Audition CS6 Voice Removal Feature (Karaoke) - Unable to remove vocals completly

[Guest]

Hi all,

I am a novice Audition user. I am using this to create Karaoke (vocal removal). But i see that the software removes only partial voice (only dilutes it).

I am using Adobe Audition CS6.  Stereo Imagery -> Center Channel Extractor (CCE) -> Presets (Karaoke -20dB) + Frequency (Male Voice). The end result is just a suppressed / distorted vocals that's all. I even tried to reduce the center channel to -40dB instead of -20dB, Still no use. I tried this on multiple songs (with Male Voices) and all have the same effect.

I read in another forum that if the original song has slight reverb CCE may not work. Is this true? But almost all songs have a bit of reverb on the vocals. I have a 'not so helpful' colleague of mine who brings out pure Karaoke and claims it to be from Adobe Audition 3.0 (a  much older verison than what I am using).

I think I am missing some additional step. Please assist.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Dsb_1984 wrote:

I read in another forum that if the original song has slight reverb CCE may not work. Is this true? But almost all songs have a bit of reverb on the vocals. I have a 'not so helpful' colleague of mine who brings out pure Karaoke and claims it to be from Adobe Audition 3.0 (a  much older verison than what I am using).

I think I am missing some additional step. Please assist.

It's true, I'm afraid. The Center Channel 'Eliminator' operates on a very narrow part of the stereo field, and if you widen it you start to lose a lot of original music. The reverb is almost invariably spread wider than the mono voice, and will leave a ghostly presence of it, whatever you do. And you have to be careful with it anyway, as it will also remove anything else that's in the centre - like the bass, for instance.

The chances are that your colleague isn't doing what he says at all - there are plenty of Karaoke track providers around who can create backing tracks that sound remarkably like the original, but they do this from scratch, not from vocal removal. It's almost a dead cert that this is what he's doing.

[Bob Howes]

Yup.  I've been using Audition since before it was Audtion (if you see what I mean).  AA3.0 can't do anything that CS6 can't--indeed it's slightly less flexible.

The thing with vocal removal is that the effectiveness varies hugely from track to track.  Sometimes I've had almost perfect results, other times getting rid of even part of the vocal makes a total hash of the music.

As Steve says, commercial karaoke tracks aren't made by eliminating vocals on the original tracks (that would violate a ton of copyright laws anyway).  Basically a musician with a keyboard/synth sits down and records a duplicate.  Indeed, I have a friend in the UK who made a fairly good living doing just that between gigs doing film and TV music (which is what he really wanted to do).  Some of his imitations were very good indeed!

I will say though that it's always worth tweaking the presets a little.  Sometimes a small change can make the difference--there's no one magic setting.