Things I Have Learned Recently

[melannen]

1. I am never, ever going to be the next hot mashup artist, because none of the songs I want to mash up have acapella (or karaoke) tracks available. I mean I can understand Spike Jones or the Original Broadway Soundtrack of The Sound of Music not having any, but surely They Might Be Giants acapellas are out there somewhere?

1a. For some reason all my Homestuck fic bunnies now come with bonus mashup ideas.

1b. Why don't people do fannish mashups, anyway?

2. There's a small kinkmeme I'm reading where I've sworn to feedback every story (not hard, they are all really good), and I have learned that if my feedback options are a) leave a one-sentence anon comment after reading, or b) find the link to the AO3 repost, log in to AO3, navigate back to fic, scroll down to the kudos button, leave kudos, navigte back to kinkmeme, my brain still thinks that b) is easier.

3. I really need to stop reading Homestuck fic because now when I read fic in any other fandom and a character goes all angsty about how their love interest will never reciprocate because it's just pity, I can't understand why they would be upset...

4. Something in my head is unable to understand Clint/Coulson fic, because it keeps going "why would you write about two extremely minor male characters when you could have Darcy in your story instead?"

Comments

[melannen]

There's a way to get rid of the vocals in Audacity which is fairly easy, I've messed around with it a bit, but it depends on the fact that the vocals were a) originally recorded in a separate track, and b) mixed into the instrumentals exactly in the middle between the left and right stereo tracks.

This works reasonably well on most tracks that are mixed that way! But the older, and less pop/electronic mainstream, the track is, the less likely it seems to work. (most obvious: if it wasn't recorded in stereo or with multitracking, that ain't gonna work, which means to start with almost nothing recorded before 1960. Of course if it wasn't recorded with multitracking there aren't going to be surviving acapellas anyway, hence my dilemma.) Most TMBG vocals seem to be slightly off-center, which means you can get rid of *most* of the vocal, but not all of it, that way. And you can't do the reverse and erase the instrumentals and only leave vocals, though it seems like you should be able to.

Is there a way to do it using only frequencies? It would be awesome if there was...