Karaoke Equipment & Supplies

On audacity the “split sterio track” option is greyed out. how do I get it?

I’m trying to create a karaoke track, and all the videos on youtube say that you simply open the track in youtube, highlight it and click the little tab next to the file name (once opened in audacity), and click on “Split Stereo Track”. On mine, this option is greyed out. Also, on the youtube videos when they open the track, they all get two boxes with the track in it, like 2 blue things. I only get one.

The “two blue things” (tracks) are the clue.
Stereo has two tracks so if you only see one it’s mono.
There is a way to create two tracks but it would not help.
Most of the audio information on each of a stereo recording’s tracks are different although the vocal and a little of the music is the same or common to both tracks. The tracks have to have these differences for the vocal removal to work.
If you made a copy of the mono track both would be the same and vocal removal would not work.

Are you aware that Audacity will only play files in wav, mp3, Ogg of aiff formats?
You will also need the Lame codec to encode your work to mp3 once you’ve got things figured out.

Here’s Lame if you need it:

http://lame.sourceforge.net/

Here’s a basic tutorial:

http://www.guidesandtutorials.com/audacity-tutorial.html

And here’s the vocal removal method:

This is possible only for certain stereo tracks. When the vocals are exactly the same on both stereo channels, you can remove them by “subtracting” one channel from the other. This works for many studio recordings, where the vocal track is mixed exactly in the center. Be aware that bass and drums are usually panned to the center and can be removed or reduced also. Depending on how the track was mixed the vocal may only be reduced, not fully removed.

To do this in Audacity 1.2:

1. Import your stereo file into Audacity.
2. Open the track menu (click the arrow next to the track title), and choose “Split Stereo Track.”
3. Select the lower track (the right channel) by clicking it in the area around the mute/solo buttons.
4. Choose “Invert” from the Effects menu.
5. Using the track menus, change each track to “Mono.”

Press the Play button to hear the results. If you are lucky, the voice will be gone but most of the other instruments will be unaffected, just like a karaoke track. You can use the Export commands in the File menu to save the results.

Audacity 1.3:
Has a vocal remover built in. Just select the whole track then vocal remover from the effect menu.

Create Karaoke Tracks by Removing the Vocals in Audacity

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