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Separating Sound Effects, Dialogue and Music?

Phantom Stranger

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That's a pretty informative link, Boon.

If you come across any specific instructions for Audacity (or any audio program for that matter) please post them as I'm not sure how to apply that information.
 

boon23

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every audio editor has an invert function. Try it out.
use 2 waves of the same section, invert one and put it on the original wave. Result: silence.
If you do this with just a part of the sound (for example the music) the music will be deleted, but the rest will stay. This also works with noise or a voice.
But like I said: try it out.
 

DaveRambo

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A belated thank you to everyone who replied! Loads of great advice here, thanks! :)
 

gobalicious

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Complete editing noob here...

I'm wondering what techniques exist to separate dialogue, music, and sound effects. I'm aware that different channels can separate dialogue or music. But is this common? Are they often inseparably mixed? Do other techniques exist?
 

nOmArch

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If I had a penny for everytime a thread like crops up I'd probably have enough to buy a pint :lol:

Speaking of which I've been drinking so I can't bothered to search out the relevant thread, just have a quick search around the guides section and you'll find what you need pretty quickly. Alternatively wait for someone less inebriated to answer :)
 

ThrowgnCpr

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nOmArch said:
If I had a penny for everytime a thread like crops up I'd probably have enough to buy a pint :lol:

Speaking of which I've been drinking so I can't bothered to search out the relevant thread, just have a quick search around the guides section and you'll find what you need pretty quickly. Alternatively wait for someone less inebriated to answer :)

This. PLEASE search the forum before posting repeats. There aren't that many threads in the audio section, a simple 2 minute scan and you would have found the following threads:

http://www.fanedit.org/forums/showthread.php?2699-Isolating-the-audio-from-2-clips
http://www.fanedit.org/forums/showthread.php?4406-Knock-Out
http://www.fanedit.org/forums/showthread.php?604-Take-Out-Dialogue
http://www.fanedit.org/forums/showthread.php?298-Separating-Sound-Effects-Dialogue-and-Music (can this thread title get any closer to what you want???)
http://www.fanedit.org/forums/showt...our-own-score-to-an-edited-scene-guide-needed.
http://www.fanedit.org/forums/showthread.php?1531-Soundsoap-How-to-use-it
http://www.fanedit.org/forums/showt...and-effects-track-isolation-possible-solution

I'll clean up these various threads soon, but for now, please use one of the linked above. and reading the forum announcement might help too...
http://www.fanedit.org/forums/showthread.php?1211-Need-Help
 

ThrowgnCpr

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FYI, this thread is now closed. Anyone with inquiries about audio isolation can use one of the threads I linked above. Frink, you will have to amuse yourself elsewhere :)

I will delete this thread once the above audio editing threads are cleaned up
 

TV's Frink

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ThrowgnCpr said:
Frink, you will have to amuse yourself elsewhere :)
sad_strut_robot_walk_by_ikstudio.gif
 

addiesin

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Audacity 1.3 Beta requires a little setup (installing codecs) but is worth it as a free alternative. It will open movie files and let you see all audio tracks, which can then be combined or separated from each other and saved into whatever audio format you want. I find it very helpful.
 

white43

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Woah - a bit of a thread resurrection there. That's what a 4 year old thread.
 

ThrowgnCpr

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the general contents of this thread aren't exactly what the title specifies, but I've had it with the countless duplicate threads. I will be combining and cleaning up soon. For now, continue to post in this thread as to what the topic describes.
 

njvc

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Hi all, for my Where the Wild Things Are edit, I have split the 5.1 to six mono tracks, and want to isolate the dialogue. Unfortunately while all the dialogue is in the centre, the music is spilled all over it. Does anyone know a way to get rid of the soundtrack elements and keep the dialogue/foley from a mono track? I know this is a probably impossible... But hey, it doesn't hurt to ask.
 

njvc

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The best solution I have so far is to de-noise/EQ the track to minimise music spill as much as possible, then cut out the dialogue and paste it over a new foley/sound effects track. It's simplistic, but it works well enough in some scenes.
 

geminigod

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Noise gate and/or use of a more complex noise removal filter are you best bets. Audacity has one of the best noise removal filters I have used. Depending on how loud the music spillover is unfortunately neither of these solutions may work all the time without severely degrading your dialogue. Since music generally covers such a broad range of frequencies, there is really no way to not cause some dialogue degradation. Using an EQ initially to isolated your dialogue a bit more might help also before applying noise gate or filter. If the dialogue gets too quiet in the process, you can use Normalize to make it louder and the tweak the Gain.
 

TMBTM

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when the music is is not too present, but still there, you can try a "dynamic" filter" (a least thats how it's named in premiere pro;
The settings are a bit complicated but basicly the trick is that you can boost the loud sounds while reducing to a minimum the lower ones (music).
So each time a word start the volume is boosed (or kept as the same level) and as soon as it stops, the volume is dropped to zero. That could prevent you the long task to do it manualy.
But this only really work when the music is not too loud, the spoken lines not too long, and if you add a music and new sound effects above to hide the trick.

To really remove unwanted music. You may try a filter you can find in Audacity called "noise removal".
Basicaly you select a segment of sound that is the kind of sound/frequencies you want to remove. Here the music.
So you first "get the noise profil"
Then you apply it to the part with the same kind of music with the voices on.
You have some settings to make the effect stonger or softer, but of course, the strongest you go, the more some frequencies of your voices will also be removed,
because they will surely share some of the frenquencies with the music. removing violin is particulary hard because it shares some same frenquencies with the human voice for example.

The only way to remove for sure a music from the voice is to have the exact same music without the voices. Soundtrack music from CD wont work. You'd need the exact same frenquencies, the exact same volume, everything. So, all in all, there is close to zero chance that this methode would work. But you can try:
Let's say you have an Elvis song in stereo, and the exact same song but only the instrumental version. Compression is same, volume is the same, it starts exactely at the same moment etc...
Well, if you open those two piece of music in Audacity and go: effect/invert on ONE of them... then there is a good chance you'll end with only the voice of Elvis. Because most of the time on records, the main voice is the only elements that is exactely the same on both left and right (along with the bass sometime...)
So this effect "invert" frequencies. And when two exact opposite frequencies are played at the same time: as strange as it is there is no sound to be heard.

I spent hours working on that last trick and came up with nothing good. But it's fun to try.
 

njvc

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Thanks guys. I'm aware of the 'invert' frequencies effect, we used it when recording my band's last album - it's kind of mind blowing actually! But you're right, I can't do that here. The issue I have is that the spectrum of frequencies is too broad in the soundtrack to completely remove it without destroying the dialogue. I think my best solution in those tricky scenes is to remove the bass - this seems to give the effect that the music is diegetic, rather than soundtrack (i.e. on the radio or something.) We'll see...
 

geminigod

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Oh yes, The frequency invert trick is a good one. I haven't played around with that at all and should. It might have been useful in some instances with this 7.1 track I am working with.

Unfortunately the noise removal filter tends to only work well with pretty constant frequency "white noise" type sounds. But I did just think of something that might work better which I have never tried. In Audacity you can choose to remove or isolate with the noise removal effect. It might work better to sample a section of dialogue and then try isolating. This theoretically would be much easier for the filter. If anybody has tried this, please report back!
 
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