Hacker News Reader

Comment by lightedman | Hacker News Reader

Learn how to do waveform inversions - if you have a stereo signal, anything not fully-centered will come through better while the rest is cut out. You can then take that, invert it, and play it back with the original, cutting out that noise and keeping the fully-centered things like vocals present.

This is how I play guitar to my favorite songs on my computer.

View on HN

this sounds interesting. could you elaborate a bit? it is unclear if you are inverting once, or twice. "if you have a stereo signal, anything not fully-centered will come through better while the rest is cut out" -- is this before or after an inversion?

Of stereo tracks L and R, you invert R and add it to L, effectively canceling anything centered. This usually removes voices. If you subtract (invert then add) the result from the original L and R tracks you get centered sounds only. Results range from perfect to not effective at all depending on the songs you apply it to.

This is correct. It is a shame there are no music players that can do this natively. I have to do every track I wish to play along with by hand in Audacity (or if I'm using my Win2K laptop, Cool Edit Pro 2000.)

Alternatively (in theory, anyways,) you can do a spectral analysis, create a selection/range of frequencies to invert, and that can usually handle isolating individual instruments regardless of stereo isolation as long as the other instrument octave ranges do not overlap with the one you're isolating. I'd love a music player that could do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com