I heard that Pro Tools has one function that can take any commercial tape or CD and split the song into its original tracks(instruments), even after the final mixdown. Too bad I don't have a Mac. Is there any program for the PC/Windows that can do this? I really hope to be able to do it. Thanks!
Track splitting software?
- Thread starter Rolland
- Start date
Can't be done on any platform. Once the audio is combined to a stereo mix, there is no way to derive the source tracks from that mix. There are an unlimited number of possibilities for how individual sounds can be combined to create the resulting sound... no way to know how it was actually done.
AlChuck
Well-known member
pglewis is right...
Think of it like this. Before the song is mixed, say you have one track of guitar, one track of drums, one track of bass. I'll use a really simplistic analogy and say it's like having three cups, each with a bunch of rice in them.
Then you mix the three tracks into one (pour the rice cups all together into one bowl).
Once you have done this, there's no way to get the same rice grains back into the cups they used to be in. They have lost any information about where they came from and all you can do is guess.
There are some programs that try to use the fact that certain instruments are predominant in certain parts of the spectrum, and so you can do things like "remove" the vocals from a song, but really all you are doing is cutting out the frequencies where the vocal is predominant, and hoping that this removes enough so that any other effect of the vocals is so dimished that the sound like they're gone, and that you didn't also remove important content for all the other instruments in the mix to sound like they should.
Hope this makes some sense...
-AlChuck
Think of it like this. Before the song is mixed, say you have one track of guitar, one track of drums, one track of bass. I'll use a really simplistic analogy and say it's like having three cups, each with a bunch of rice in them.
Then you mix the three tracks into one (pour the rice cups all together into one bowl).
Once you have done this, there's no way to get the same rice grains back into the cups they used to be in. They have lost any information about where they came from and all you can do is guess.
There are some programs that try to use the fact that certain instruments are predominant in certain parts of the spectrum, and so you can do things like "remove" the vocals from a song, but really all you are doing is cutting out the frequencies where the vocal is predominant, and hoping that this removes enough so that any other effect of the vocals is so dimished that the sound like they're gone, and that you didn't also remove important content for all the other instruments in the mix to sound like they should.
Hope this makes some sense...
-AlChuck
gaffa
Recalcitrant Member
AlChuck is right - and with a brilliant analogy 
. While there is no decent way of doing it, it can be half done using a whole bucketload of notch EQ's, and just chop the specific freq's out until you've got some thing resembling what you want. It ain't even close to perfect, but with a bnit of work, it is possible to make certain instruments stand out more than others
- gaffa
[This message has been edited by gaffa (edited 07-18-2000).]
. While there is no decent way of doing it, it can be half done using a whole bucketload of notch EQ's, and just chop the specific freq's out until you've got some thing resembling what you want. It ain't even close to perfect, but with a bnit of work, it is possible to make certain instruments stand out more than others- gaffa
[This message has been edited by gaffa (edited 07-18-2000).]