What is the best free program to use to edit mp3's and remove voice from the song?

Question

I want to remix songs and I can't find one that will allow me to remove the voice from the sound or ad voice from another song into a song

Answer 1

it's tricky and most of the software that purports to 'remove vocals' doesn't do a very good job at it. the link provides instructions on how to manually give it a go but the results can be less than spectacular...

here's an excerpt from the link...


STEPS FOR REMOVING VOCALS

The most basic procedure is to load a stereo Wave file of the original song into an audio editor program, flip the polarity of one channel and lower the bass level somewhat, and then combine the left and right channels into a new, mono track. I use Sound Forge 4.5 from Sonic Foundry, which includes all the tools needed to manipulate audio files this way. Sound Forge lets you load a single stereo file, manipulate the left and right channels separately, and then combine them to mono all within one edit window.

Load the original stereo file.
Copy just the left channel to a new edit window.
Copy just the right channel to another new edit window.
* Reverse the polarity of the new left channel.
* Apply a low end shelf cut starting at 200 Hz (at least 12 dB/octave) to the new left channel.
Paste the processed left channel into the new right channel in Mix mode (not Overwrite).
Audition the result and, if it's acceptable, save it to a new Wave file.

Answer 2

There's a few free audio editing programs out there. Only Audacity comes to mind though.

As far as removing voice from a song so you can remix, the short answer is... you can't.

There are, however a few tricks you can use depending on the type of music. If it's electronic (hip-hop, techno, rap), you can usually find bits and pieces of the song where the vocalist is silent and piece the beat back together. This is fairly hard to do and usually only works if a) the FX are attached to the time signature of the beat (in other words, the beat and FX are identical throughout the song) and b) the tempo/key doesn't change either.

This method doesn't generally work when the music is recorded (i.e. classical, jazz, rock, live, reggae, etc...) as the tempo of the song and the relative volume of the instrument may change slightly enough that the pieced-together beat is not seamless.

If it one of these types of music that you want to remix, you may consider hiring a band to perform the piece. It's usually only a couple hundred bucks.