Remove Vocals from MP3 Songs

"I like to sing karaoke at my house. How can I remove the vocals from my MP3s so I can make my own karaoke music?"

The best way to get great sounding karaoke music is to buy music that comes without vocals in the first place. If that's not an option, a number of tools help you remove vocals from MP3 files to make your own karaoke songs. None of them do this perfectly, because the whole premise of removing vocals is based on eliminating frequencies commonly found in the human vocal range from the file. Often these frequencies are also common to other instruments, so the sound of the entire song can sometimes get a little iffy. Here's a couple of my favorite ways to remove vocals from audio tracks.

Removing Vocals with Wavosaur

The most cost effective way to eliminate vocals is to use Wavosaur. Be sure to download Wavosaur before proceeding.
First open the file you want to remove vocals from in Wavosaur by selecting it using File > Open. The application defaults to opening WAV files, so you may need to switch the Of Type to MP3 or whatever your file format happens to be.

Once the file is loaded in Wavosaur, choose Processing > Vocal Remover from the menu and Wavosaur automatically removes vocal frequencies from the file.

To save the file with vocals removed as an MP3, you need to download LAME and place it in the Wavosaur directory. You can find directions on where to get LAME in the Wavosaur support forum. Make sure you choose Save As when saving the vocal impaired file, or it will over-right your existing file.

If you have a bunch of files you want to remove vocals from all at once, you can do a batch process with Wavosaur. Open Wavosaur, then go to Tools > Batch Processor on the menu. Choose the directory containing all the files you want to remove vocals from. Choose a directory to store the converted files. Select Vocal Removal from the Function list and click the Run button. Depending on how many files you chose, this might take awhile.