The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I'm sure there's an actual name for this, but I'm looking for an instrument stripper (something to lift just vocals out of a song for sampling) if anyone knows of any?

It's usually called 'center cut', and there's lots of 'karaoke' type plugins out there. They usually work decent for vocal removal, not sure about the other way around.. I've played around with the 'Center Channel Extractor' plugin built-in to Adobe Audition, and had mixed results.

If the vocals are dead center in the mix, you might have some luck doing this:

1) make 2 copies of the wave.
2) invert the left side of one, then convert it to mono. (most of the vocals will be phase-cancelled out)
3) import the new waveform as a noise-reduction profile, and apply it to the untouched wave... it will either work good, or sound like complete crap.

From the teach-a-man-to-fish dept.

http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_front_center/

http://virtualturntable.fourstones.net/ ... n-tutorial

(In short, vocals are generally in the center channel, but so are most of the drums. So you need to convert your L/R stereo signal to a M/S signal, then apply some processing to the mid signal to remove as many transients as you can.)

Exactly what you are asking for.