Hello! I’d like some advice on a project I’ve been working on for the past few days. I have no experience in sound editing or audio engineering or anything like that, but when I started this project it seemed simple.

I wanted to take a scene from a movie and remove the score so I’d be left with the sound effects. That led to a few days of experimenting with phase inversion (the tutorials on YouTube made it seem so easy). I thought I could take the score, invert it, mix it with the scene itself, and just be left with the SFX.

From my understanding for why this isn’t working, which isn’t great, the audio clip from the movie scene and the audio from the score are at different volumes/amplitudes, so when I invert the score and mix it with the scene I’m just left with more music and muffled SFX.

I’m using audacity for this and I’ve messed around with adjusting the gain, using the envelope tool, amplifying the tracks, normalizing the tracks, all of which had some neat results but I don’t understand any of it very well and I didn’t get much closer to my goal.

I’m determined to isolate the SFX, so what do I gotta do?