Cant remove background speech from foreground music

Ladywriter1968

I have a recording of a piano piece from a friend but his partner was on the phone and her conversation is going all the way through the recording. I have tried audacity to remove her conversation so that I have have him playing piano only, just music only. But it does not work and does not seem to know the difference between speech and music, I wondered if there was any programs that can remove background talking and speech.

Thanks.

cookie365

The only effective way of doing it is if you have an identical recording of just the phone conversation, which of course you won't.

Get your friend to play the piece again.

I_have_spoken

Yep, you'll never get a clean recording of just the piano, certain keys and the woman's voice will be at exactly the same frequency.

fwor

Is it a stereo recording, and is the piano central, with the voice to one side?

If so, I believe there are tools that you can use that will enhance anything present on both stereo channels and reduce anything that is present on one more than the other. It may help, but the result will never be perfect.

googler

cookie365 wrote: »

Get your friend to play the piece again.

This.

There's a reason recording studios have many cubic feet of sound insulation and triple glazing surrounding them, and you've discovered it the hard way, I'm afraid.....

JohnB47

Izotope rx would do what you want but you'd pay at least £50 for it.

Perhaps use Audacity and find a way to make use of the fact that the piano sounds are louder than the speech? Some sort of audio level filtering.

I think Reaper Daw has an inbuilt facility a bit like Izotope. Can't remember. Will look tomorrow. Reaper is free to trial.

Heedtheadvice

It is certainly not easy to very difficult depending on several factors of the relative sounds.

Audacity can automatically reduce background sound/noise that is consistently the same such as a background hum or similar sound.

Other programme can do similarly with a better or worse result.

Short intermittent sounds can be analysed and removed.

Non consistent sounds over a long period are much more difficult to remove and require expert skills and facilities and can take a long time and are therefore professionally costly.

Speech has certain consistent qualities, more so of just one person, which can be utilised but it is often a protracted task to remove sufficiently well. Some techniques can reduce it somewhat. Female voice and piano will not be easy.

Certainly best result and easiest is a new recording as already mentioned.

downhillfast

If this was simple then 'proper' recordings wouldn't still be done on multiple separate tracks. You will never get a decent result without spending a lot of time and money of fancy software and even then it will be far from perfect.

Ladywriter1968

Ok thanks for the answers.. I tried audacity but it didnt work. Due to his age and health I dont want to impose to much on him to re do it. So thought I would ask if was another way to remove her voice from the music. But as everyone has said its seems practically impossible thing to so since her voice is combined in with the recording, I took recording from my mobile phone. Was asked if in mono or stereo, I assume its stereo from my samsung phone as when put on audacity came out as stereo, even when tried convert channels to mono didnt work. oh well never mind. thanks for answers.

Heedtheadvice

Have sent you a personal message (pm)

AnotherJoe

You need the software that is used in the CSI or NCIS tv programmes, where any sounds can be removed from any other , for example you could remove a simultaneous explosion and train crash in the background of a death metal thrash concert, to leave just the sound of a single bird tweeting, find its a rare bird that only lives in one area of a hundred feet radius and find the bad guys.

Other than that, record it again