First of all, where to find acapellas?
Here’s the #1 site to download acapellas from: Acapellas4u.co.uk
If you find any other good websites or facebook pages for that, please post them in the comments and I will add them to this article.
The problem: they are very limited, you can’t find ALL the acapellas you want, especially the brand new ones or the more “underground” ones.
This article will show you how to rip an acapella from a track using Audacity.
“When the search for an acapella track fails, there are certain production techniques a DJ can take advantage of to isolate the vocals on a track. In order to be successful at ripping your own acapellas you must work with a high quality audio file (MP3s will not cut it here) and you will need both the instrumental of the track as well as the full version with vocals.
A trick known as “sample inversion”, though not fool-proof, can help you capture just the acapella of your favorite song. Sample inversion works by canceling out all of the background frequencies in a track, inverting the audio on the instrumental track, and leaving you with the vocal frequencies to do with as you please. Sample inversion can be applied by following these steps:
Step 1. In your favorite audio editor (I like using Audacity for this), import both the instrumental and the full song on to separate audio tracks.
Step 2. Since the song you’re working with is most likely in stereo, convert both tracks to mono audio and pan one all the way left and one all the way right. Audacity will split both stereo tracks when converting to mono, so also remove any extra tracks that may have been created during this step.
Step 3. Take care to make sure that both tracks are perfectly in sync with each other, lining up the start point of each waveform. The position of the peaks and valleys in the waveform and how well they line up is crucial here. This alignment must be surgically exact in order to isolate the vocal properly.
Step 4. Once you’ve lined up the audio, select your instrumental track and use the Invert option to flip the waveform upside down. This will create the audio cancellation effect we’re going for by adding interference to the instrumental of the layered tracks, letting the vocals shine through without any background frequencies.
If you hear a muffled backing track with a clean vocal part, then pat yourself on the back because you’ve successfully applied sample inversion! If not, you shouldn’t get discouraged. This technique relies heavily on both tracks being mastered in the same exact way at the same exact tempo and at a high quality bit-rate. Getting all these elements spot on can be difficult, but try using this technique on older tunes for surprising results.
Another useful trick for isolating vocals involves applying Noise Reduction to a track in the hopes of filtering out the high end or low end frequencies of the audio. If successful, you’ll be left with the middle shelf of the vocal and almost no background instrumental. In order for this technique to work you’ll have to use a song with a very simple backing track, where the instrumental sits in mostly the same frequencies (high or low). In Audacity select Effects -> Noise Removal and try tweaking some of the variables until you get a clear isolated acapella with minimal background noise.”
Read the original article from djtechtools
