On 15/09/05, kcronin wrote: > i come to you on bended knee seeking the answer to a > question from my sis-in-law: how does one get an > instrument track off of a recording? Is it possible, > or do we give home-recording technology too much > credit? What she'd like to do is take the flute (for > instance) track off of a, say, Boston Pop's recording, > so she can practice to the flute part...then PLAY the > flute part to the actual recording WITHOUT the flute > part. > > er...if that made sense to anyone, can you tell us if > we're just crazy dreamers or not? > > your humble, technologically challanged lurker, It's *SORT* of possible, sometimes, in some situations, but probably not in the case you're talking about. Basically, if the flute track is dead centre in the stereo spectrum, you can electronically 'subtract' one side of the stereo spectrum from the other, leaving a mono track without anything from the centre. Most audio programs have facilities to do this (usually labelled 'karaoke' , but I've also seen it referred to as OOPSing, for Out-Of-Phase Stereo). This can be used to remove lead vocals and guitar solos from many recordings (you can also reverse the process and get *only* the lead vocal and guitar solo). But it's only possible if the stereo mix is fairly wide, which isn't true for most classical recordings. You can't just choose 'flute' or whatever, you can only get rid of left, middle or right channel. -- DUMB ANGEL HAS UPDATED 13/8/05! http://dumbangel.keenspace.com A webcomic about Smile