Ableton Forum

Hi guys, just downloaded the program and it's awesome. Just wondering is there anyway you can take an audio file such as an mp3 and break it up into separate tracks for remixing? For instance, I'd like to take the vocals of a song in my mp3 collection and put them over the top of a backing track I have made.

If not, is there a program that will do this? Any other ways of doing this?

Thanks in advance guys.

I don't think you can seperate individual parts of an audio track automatically.

AFAIK, what you want to do can pretty much be achieved by lots of EQing. Good luck.

logix wrote:Just wondering is there anyway you can take an audio file such as an mp3 and break it up into separate tracks for remixing?

Make a program that'll do that, and you'll be a rich man!

they can turn lead into gold but they still can't do that.

they can turn lead into gold

When did that happen?!?

As an analogy taking a mixed down song back apart is akin to disassembling your birthday cake to get the eggs out to make crepes.

lol ok, nice analogy . So how do the pros do it? Do they just get hold of the original copies before they're mixed down?

What's the best way of mixing the tracks? I know a little about warping but are there any other hints/tricks?

Pros get a hold of acapella versions of tracks, dig around, you can find them, usually as b-sides on single vinyl.

A basic setup is with EQ3 (but EQ4 sounds much better.) Notice that a lot of DJ mixers have kill switches for low, mid and hi bands, they're for exactly what you're talking about.

Make a few tracks with mp3s in them warped and ready to go.
launch them all with the volume down
bring one up, play with EQ3 until you can isolate part of a song
do this for all the tracks, see what each can offer
sometimes you can isolate vocals pretty well, enough so that if you have another track with a drum beat you won't notice other stuff behind the vocals.

by doing this you can play drums from song A to vocals from song B, then mix into drums from B with vocals from A.

Experiment and have fun.

As an alternative, if you just want to learn to remix, there's occasional remix contests around here (and other forums) where the artists provide stems (i.e. the individual audio tracks), or sometimes just the original source sounds.

Patch wrote:

they can turn lead into gold

When did that happen?!?

It requires a particle accelerator , a lead atom has 1 electron more than a gold atom & the particle accelerator is used to knock it off thus turning lead into gold.

It seems alchemists weren't so wrong after all,

but i might be.

So these two atoms are walking down the road, and one of them says "you know, I think I've lost an electron." The other atom asks "are you sure?" The first replies... "I'm positive!"

Pitch Black wrote:So these two atoms are walking down the road, and one of them says "you know, I think I've lost an electron." The other atom asks "are you sure?" The first replies... "I'm positive!"

DAMN YOU, PITCH BLACK!!!

I searched the forum for an hour last night trying to find that joke to reply to annihilator.1 with!

annihilator.1 wrote:

Patch wrote:

they can turn lead into gold

When did that happen?!?

It requires a particle accelerator , a lead atom has 1 electron more than a gold atom & the particle accelerator is used to knock it off thus turning lead into gold.

It seems alchemists weren't so wrong after all,

but i might be.

Wrong a bit,

Lead has 3 more electrons, 3 more protons, and 6 more neutrons. Now theoretically the neutrons are semi-irrelevant, since they provide isotopicity (the things that essentially make stuff radioactivity) You'd still need to rip off 2 protons, which is not easy.

I think these numbers are correct now!!

Never-the-less, a particle accelerator should be able to do it with luck.

depending on how the original is mixed, there are phase tricks you can try. flip the phase of one channel and bounce to mono. see what you're left with.

***edit***
i meant "sum" to mono

tylenol wrote:As an alternative, if you just want to learn to remix, there's occasional remix contests around here (and other forums) where the artists provide stems (i.e. the individual audio tracks), or sometimes just the original source sounds.

4 stem packs here: http://www.realworldremixed.com/download.php