The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Can't believe anyone posted this yet... in these modern days, there are tools to split/remove e.g. vocals from a finished mix that don't sound completely terrible. You get 4-5 separate tracks out of them (think bass/drums/vocals/misc), and/or a set of faders to re-balance these parts of the audio.

One of these is Deezer's Spleeter - open source! For a convenient free web interface that doesn't even require registration, how about this one: https://splitter.ai/ - and here's an example, using the MP3 submission of my last SF winner track and removing the vocals from it: Another is iZotope's RX 8. In RX 7 this feature already existed but I thought Spleeter sounded a little better. RX 8 manages to outperform both in my opinion. The downside, of course, is that it's not free. Here's an example using the same source file: PS. using an MP3 file as the source exposes some of the psychoacoustic destruction of the MP3 codec, in addition to any processing artifacts. I didn't have an uncompressed version of the original mix handy, though. Sorry.

Wow, that's pretty cool. I recently used RX 7 to remove the bleed of drum stick clicks from a bass guitar track. (The bass was recorded through a mic'd amp, not direct.) It worked surprisingly well! This kind of stuff is up there with polyphonic autotune in being very mind blowing.

If you wanted a local copy of Spleeter that doesn't require a bunch of crazy Python install stuff (Windows 10 only though)... https://makenweb.com/#spleetergui I have used this in the past to try and split some instrument files to use for transcribing purposes... much easier than trying to transcribe bass from a full mix for me. I haven't tried RX7/8 yet...