can i isolate vocals? (music-editor)

i don't know of that kind of software, but i'm sure it exists somewhere on the planet.

I have sometimes been able to isolate music parts after mixdown by using a combination of very very intense parametric eq, keyed-noise gating, guesswork, and smart editing.

There is a lot of information available in print about which frequencies are most present in human speech. there is over 30 years of international research into this. a lot of it done by Bell Labs, and AT&T and such. You could contact the Audio Engineering Society or the Acoustical Society of the Americas.

In general, though, what you'd like to do is probably not worth all of the work.

if you're into tedium and expanding your mind, though... you could figure out exactly what key the vocalist is singing in.

then translate that key into an exact frequency in Hertz. next, figure out all of the other musical notes bein sung, or the general ones used over and over again..

map each of these notes to their Hertz frequency counterparts. This way, you know exactly what to Eq. However, you will need to map these out on a graph of time, since no one just sings in a monotone, but Puff Daddy and chanting monks.

Using eq and your knowledge of where the singing starts and stops, you can practice boosting and cutting the frequencies of the singer's voice.

With a lot of attention, you will hear which frequencies are dominant by whether or not they are affected when you boost or cut them. You will have to be strategic and use your logic and deductive reasoning. This will go faster if you know at the very least the highest and lowest notes in the entire vocal part.

That way you can cut a lot of frequencies outside of the vocalist's range. Just remember that you will not end up with results that sound natural.
You would need extremely sophisticated software to do that, and it would still probably sound like a vocoder.

More than likely, it's much more wise to forget it try easier, friendlier projects in more organized conditions.

Nothing can beat a well organized, acoustically versatile studio setup with a willing and able engineer workhorse and a good multitrack.

A recording studio is functionally there so that you can not have to research these kinds of questions after recording a diamond embedded in a turd.

You can't polish a turd, some say.
I think it can be done, but afterwards you're still stuck with a turd, just a really unusually glossy one. Who needs it!!!?

Find out how much time you are wasting with B.S. first. Remove all of that crap, and when you are done, you will only have left the tools to get the job done. The crap could be anyone and anything that gets in the way of your musical progress.

Don't forget your purpose at each step in the game. It's wise to ask often... why the hell am i doing this, and how much longer will i put up with doing it?

Sometimes it's good to throw it all away and start fresh, then use the refuse for wild remixes.

If you find reading this response boring, then trying to isolate vocals from anything other than a one man a capella in a sound isolation booth will drive you absolutely to cuckooland.

Personally, i enjoy overdubbing as a cure all,...
but even overdubbing and masking sounds can be limited because there's only so much time in each day to work on each track... even if you don't work, eat, or sleep, but only make tunes and study audio engineering and music composition.

Trust me, i've actually done that. A lot of exploitation goes on in the music biz, cause we all get tired and lazy of the tedium. You really almost have to be an anti-social obsessive compulsive to get any real work done in a recording studio.

all of the best are like that.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't try to meet your goal of isolating the vocals...

maybe there are some cool tricks and toys out there from Japan that can do just THAT...

you'll probably learn enough to become a product designer of such a thing as you go along.

Just think of how many centuries have passed as men and women of all kinds have longed for pitch-correction software. But even that black majick has it's limits. price... studio time... a stubborn vocalist... a sore throat... a lost sense of direction...

There are no wrong answers in ART.