Let's Play Remove The Vocals....

Been hiding in another realm for a bit....But yes I emerge victorious. So what have I to purple about this first November entry begins with a simple, cool, free audio product called Audacity. It's a digital audio editing product that software developers all over the world contribute to developing. As a guitar honkey there are songs that have great song parts to listen to or even play along with. But then comes the interuption of some singer contributing their 'Oh-Yeahs' & 'Uh-huh's' & baby this & baby that & all the other not so wholesome lyrical content. If I could wiggle a finger & have something magically happen it would be to have fav songs in their published form but with all vocals muted or faded out. Forget some black box that tries to remove vocals for ya. Forget covers or cover bands or karaoke. I'm talking about the real original thing baby, oh yeah, & uh huh, & come on. So back to Audacity, I've been playing around with taking cool fav things & using the Silence tool to silence the parts I don't want to hear. And then I've been applying fade outs & fade ins & removing the silent periods I created. So you take a 4+ minute song & do this munging & you end of up a couple minutes of just raw music, or in my case, guitar carnage.

So that leads me to the realm I was hiding in. I realized that to manually repeat this process is a pain & it gets old quick. And for this dad with bizzy beez, anything to speed along such things is a must. I realized that, hey, I could write a software tool to take my .wav files with the silence periods & apply the needed fade ins, fade outs, & do the silence removal. It took a long while to find some code examples for getting at the raw audio samples in the .wav files. But after fiddling with all the codeims I have my tool. You would think some simple tutorials on wav file processing would be available on the net of inter. Not really. Cool thing about Audacity is that since it's public for developers to contribute to you can get the source code. That was a help as well in fingering out how to apply a fade to a block of audio data. And brother glob helped me to undertand what interlaced media mean. So I've emerged from my obsessive abyss about getting this thing done so I can use it as desired..I should try to add the tool to Audacity for my own use that way it's all in one place. But that would require my trying to figure out how to follow the model already in place. All I really need to do is tell Audacity to select a region, fade it out, select another region & do a fade in, then select the silent period & delete it.

Go Audacity!

Until later comes, turn it up to binary.