Is there a decent way to isolate music or sound effects

[Shadow Wolf]

Okay, so here's the question. Is there a decent way (decent here defined as something that takes less than a week) to split up the music and sound effects in an audio track? Obviously split track is preferable, but when somebody does a mixdown of a video for, say, an online movie trailer, that all gets mixed together. So is there any good way to split it up without losing the integrity of the entire track?

[Dafydd]

Theoretically, if you had a song and wanted it without vocals, you could take the vocals (solo), invert waveform and then mix it into the song, thereby cancelling the vocals in the song and ending up with one without vocals. But then you'd need the solo vocals first. Does that answer your question?

So, in order to get the sound effects on their own track, you'd need the music by itself, invert it, and then add it to the whole thing, cancelling the music, and leaving you with only the sound effects. Again, you'd need the music solo track first.

Other than the above option, the answer would be "no". Someone around here once likened it to "getting the eggs back out from a cake you've already baked". It's that hard. And there are no invert eggs in real life.

[Shadow Wolf]

That's what I figured. But if I had the solo tracks in the first place, problem's already solved.

[Dafydd]

Yeah. Except, you can isolate a single track (let's say vocals) if you have the full song and the karaoke version. Similarily, if you have both the song with the effects included and the song without effects, you can isolate the effects.