Audacity: reducing background music volume in a single track
 

I have some live music (from services at my church) that I saved and processed with Audacity. A question: With there being only one track, is there no way to reduce the volume of the musical instruments so I could hear the vocals more clearly? I'm thinking it's probably hopeless (because how would I reduce the volume on the music without reducing it on the vocals?), but there are so many options in Audacity and I don't understand all of them. On a professionally recorded song, for which the vocals and instruments were recorded on separate tracks, I suppose this would be much easier and I could figure it out myself.

I'd have to test if the vocal removal would work on single channel. There are two or more settings in it that can retain or delete frequency bands. It may slightly assist you. You could either reduce the edges of vocal frequencies or amplify the vocal sample range of frequencies. I think the thing default to a wide band.

The other way is to use mixer maybe to try to put some gain on the areas of vocals. You can view all of the audio in waveform and cut and paste and grab sections and modify them as you go. You can grab quite small sections. You may have to manually edit the tracks to help this.

The last idea may be to grab a sample of random noise or music in track to remove. I've only used it for static kind of noise by may help remove instruments.

It may be possible to fix it slightly but unless you had someone overdub the audio exactly to use as a modification too, it will be very difficult for this program to do it. The sound quality will suffer I'd think no matter what you do.

I've heard that some other advanced audio processing programs can grab instruments and maybe vocals based on some sampling in the track. Never actually seen one.

If you are trying to work on a single vocal singer it may be easier. A choral mix would be difficult.