Originally Posted by rounser
I've done it successfully about three times, and failed about the same. You need two specific things though:
1) Track with the vocal.
2) Exactly the same track without the vocal.
CD singles sometimes have an instrumental version where it's otherwise identical. Then you phase invert one of them in an audio editor, and mix the two together. You're left with the difference, which is the vocal and usually a "ghost" of the rest of track mixed very quietly in the background (due to EQ and compression differences, probably).
It won't work if the BPM is different, because the mixing over the top needs to be sample-accurate, otherwise it won't work. This is why you can't really do it off of vinyl; pressing and turntable speed irregularities will stuff up such attempts.
Good luck. Some people think it can't be done...it can, you just need these specific resources. I think there's a plugin recently announced on kvraudio called Knockout which is designed to make this process easier, such that it'll handle subtle timing differences for you.