Trying to remove vocals from songs (create karaoke) Specifically, windowing and framing help.

I have been trying to accoplish this for a little while now, but I am no expert in MATLAB (far from it). I came across a code in a forum that one guy used, but it doesn't work well at all. Thus, why he was asking for help in the forum. The advice that he was given was to: "What this means is that you have to break up your signal in frames in the time-domain and do your fft and masking separately for each frame. Also you should consider to use an overlap in your time-domain framing." and "In addition to all of the points above, Windowing is also required to minimise bleed between adjacent bins of strong frequencies." He later posted that he tried those things, and it worked well. He never reposted his code, though. I am not sure what he did to fix it. Can anyone advise me on how to do those things. Here is the code:

[y, fs] = wavread('Song.wav');
left = y(:,1);
right = y(:,2);

fftL = fft(left);
fftR = fft(right);

for i = 1:683550 %in my example 683550
 dif = fftL(i,1) / fftR(i,1);
 dif = abs(dif);
 if (dif > 0.7 & dif < 1.5)
     fftL(i,1) = 0;
     fftR(i,1) = 0;
 end;
end;

leftOut = ifft(fftL);
rightOut = ifft(fftR);

yOut(:,1) = leftOut;
yOut(:,2) = rightOut;

wavwrite(yOut, fs, 'tmp.wav');

Here is the link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14461210/matlab-removing-vocals

Thank you

[keshav poojari]

i Used R2013a . Can i use above code to remove vocals??

[Walter Roberson]

No, the above code will not do a good job of removing vocals.

[keshav poojari]

But.. Sir, what can i do??? any other method?

[Walter Roberson]

I said that code would not do a good job. However the person outlined steps that went beyond that code, and those steps are more likely to work.

[keshav poojari]

 [y,fs]=audioread(audiofile);
 left=y(:,1);
 right=y(:,2);
sound(left-right ,fs);

I used above code.. But This code not removed vocals completly.. What can i do?

[Image Analyst]

Of course not, like I said in my Answer below. I know it's not easy but you should at least TRY ICA/BSS (what I referred you to below in my Answer below) since it has a good chance of working while what you tried already is guaranteed not to work, as you already know.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

You can't simply do bandpass filtering for obvious reasons. I think you'd need something far more sophisticated like ICA and BSS (Independent Components Analysis and Blind Source Sampling). Here are some links to get you started:

link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

[Aris Cheimariotis]

What is the link 4?

[Image Analyst]

Looks like code to do ICA.

[Walter Roberson]

The code is written in Perl