Center Pan Remover

Designed as a plugin for Audacity, Center Pan Remover is designed to help you remove center-panned content from audio tracks by converting stereo channels into mono mode. This comes in handy when you are attempting to reduce vocal sounds, as long as the vocals are panned to the center.

Install, enable and access the Audacity plugin

The simple-to-use plugin comes loaded with a couple of adjustment options. It can be seamlessly set up, since all you have to do is move the downloaded file to the "Effects" folder of the Audacity program directory. If you are running Audacity during this time, you will be required to restart it to spot the new entry in the plugins manager, and enable Center Pan Remover to view and access it from the Effects menu.
After loading an audio file into the main application window, you can play it and pay attention to the vocals before using Center Pan Remover, because it doesn't give you the possibility to control audio playback in real time while fiddling with center pan settings.

Make adjustments to remove center-panned vocals

You can invert the band of channel, as well as specify two numbers to remove all frequencies above and below those limits.
It's possible to either move a slider with the mouse and use the left and right arrow keys to set the inferior and superior frequency limits in a precise manner, or to directly enter the numerical values in text format. The modified sound can be previewed to figure out whether or not further adjustments are necessary.
Apart from the fact that Center Pan Remover also includes a debugging option, advanced users may resort to command-line parameters to tinker with the plugin. There are no other notable aspects available here.

Evaluation and conclusion

The tool delivered decent results concerning audio quality in our evaluation. Although it hasn't been updated for a long time, it still works. Moreover, it didn't cause the operating system to hang, crash or prompt error dialogs, so you can test Center Pan Remover for yourself.