Preferably freeware of course, tho not too picky as long as it isn’t $300 or something. Should be high-quality and allow filtering out the original vocals so I can replace them with mine, natch.
143 hits, and no suggestions? Hmm I would have thought this would resonate with the Doper crowd at least…
Ultrastar and Performous are both free SingStar style games (scored on pitching/timing). However, it can be hard to find suitable files for these tools.
As for vocal cancelling, these sorts of tools rely on the vocals being present at the same volume and phase in both stereo channels - you can then invert one channel and mix, and the identical material cancels out. However, this can also subtract other elements from the mix, and if the vocals have been panned or chorused/phased/reverbed, then they will not cancel completely and you still hear the vocal line.
Your other choice are karaoke systems based on KAR or MID files - these use MIDI arrangements of songs with lyrics, and play those for you to sing along to. The quality of the output depends on the source midi (some are rubbish) and the MIDI to wav renderer used to generate the final output. A good SoundFont based system can sound awesome, but the default Microsoft GM renderer is pretty awful, and most people get pretty tired of that quite quickly because it can be really bad.
Si
I have this…
(You have to use Karaoke file types to edit out vocals and not regular mp3/wav files.)