Hi there, do you know if there is a way to disable laugh tracks from sitcoms? I really would like to rewatch some shows like King of Queens but I can’t bear the constant laughing in the background. Cheers

      • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        22
        ·
        1 year ago

        I think this (mild/moderate annoyance) is probably the most common reason for inventing things. From cars to remote controls.

      • Teknikal@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        I remember trying to filter out the vuvuzelas during the African world cup I mainly failed and just gave up on that whole tournament.

        Seeing this makes me think if it happens again I might have better lick.

        • Ensign Rick@startrek.website
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Seems possible. I dabbled in audio engineering, you can train a filter to remove specific noise, specifically background noise of a location.

          • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            If I remember correctly, they did that on TV after some time. But the improved audio still wasn’t good.

      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        Wow. Super impressive. Guess with today’s technology you could do it pretty much 100%. I saw that model that lets you separate music into separate tracks for guitar, vocals, drums, … Guess something like that could even separate the laughs from the next actor resuming to speak.

        Kind of also reminds me of those videos where they stabilize / de-shake Star Trek. There are some scenes where the ship gets shot at for example. And the actors act that out and the camera is shaking too and a bit at an angle. Looks funny once that camera shake is removed.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      You just have to use your judgement and laugh at what you find funny on your own, if you need peer pressure (opinions of others) to find something funny then it’s not really funny to you and maybe isn’t even funny for many people to begin with.

      This might be controversial but maybe many Sitcoms that do this were never funny in the first place and used laugh tracks because try as they might they had to force people to find it funny via artificial peer pressure, that either constitutes of a crowd being told to laugh on cue, or a recording of them doing so, which is what a laugh track is.

      Here’s the key point and why we stopped using them, things aren’t funny, people think certain things are funny, and they also think plenty of things are not funny, and like it or not people are not always going to find the same things funny.

      • LazerFX@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        I always thought it was because the earliest stuff was actually filmed infront of a live audience (Like a theatre) who did laugh, so when switching to non-live-audience stuff, the viewing public would be ‘put off’ by no laughter, so they injected it with canned laughter… then as time went on they realised this was rubbish and stopped it.

        But maybe I’m just missing the joke in the previous two comments, I dunno.

        • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          In the earlier days it was like that but as time went on it became a technique known as sweetening to make the joke seem funnier, sometimes they would even use it to fill in silence or dead air since that was frowned upon (I wonder why people said TV rots your brain for the longest time… can’t be related to any of these practices could it?).

          The beginning part is essentially saying that if people need laugh-tracks to find things funny they are dry and humor-less, a joke at their expense but also at the same time it’s 100% sincere, a person who can’t find things funny without others lacks a sense of humor.

  • Steve@communick.news
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    39
    ·
    1 year ago

    After a little while, you’re going to prefer it to the strange pauses in the dialogue.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      This is going to sound weird I prefer it to the laughing, makes it feel like they’re actually finishing their sentences rather than being cut off by people laughing at random words and seemingly cutting them off. I don’t know about most people but I find seemingly random laughter at benign things to be unpleasant and annoying.

      Though maybe in the future as media manipulation with Machine learning gets better maybe we’ll have a way to chop out the gaps seamlessly as if it never happened for the people that find the gaps more bothersome.

      By far the most unpleasant thing I find with current implementations is the fact that most aren’t seamless and they leave a lot behind when they can’t mute the whole scene such as when it’s mixed with dialogue or background audio.

  • kersploosh@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    23
    ·
    1 year ago

    Not easily. The laugh track isn’t a separate audio stream by the time you get the episode. It’s all mixed together with the dialogue and music.

    Watching a sitcom with the laugh track missing seems like it would be awkward. The actors are constantly taking extended pauses between lines, or sometimes in the middle of a line, while the laugh is happening.

    • SirGaston@feddit.deOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I get what you mean, I just watched the link from the comment below and it feels really weird to watch it like this.

            • DetachablePianist
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Just the Invidious instance I found on the official list a long time ago. I like them because they’re relatively local, super reliable, and unlike a lot of other instances they actually have the download feature enabled. But yeah, their domain name is a bit awkward, lol.

        • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          I used to work in a nightclub. We had a TV show book the club during the day to shoot some scenes, so the cast were acting out drinking and dancing, but without any music. It’s probably the most surreal thing I’ve seen in my life.

          • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            They’re music videos where the music and singing is cut and ‘ambient’ noise like squeaky shoes, breathing, grunting while doing dance moves, etc is dubbed back in. You’ll see what I mean if you watch one. It may be the same thing but I’ve just always heard of them referred to as “musicless music videos”

            • nestEggParrot@lemmy.sdf.org
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              I did. It was quite funny listening to just the lyrics. Would have been nice if they managed to keep the original vocals but that whispering voice made it funnier.

      • Lemmchen@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        I don’t see anything preventing someone from not just cutting the audio out, but the video, too. Then there shouldn’t be any awkward pauses.

        • Draconic NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          It might make for some very choppy transitions in certain areas, you’d need a way to smooth it out to make it less abrupt while still cutting out the majority of it in the parts where hard cutting wouldn’t work well.

  • battleshack@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    1 year ago

    Original video assets from a studio has multiple audio tracks, but they are transcoded down to a single audio track before distribution to the end user. Sorry.

    You could do some fancy editing, or maybe you can use machine learning somehow.

    But removing the laugh track really messes with the comedic timing.

    https://youtu.be/4BFSZ8XzWOM?feature=shared

  • ruckblack@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    1 year ago

    Have you considered how awkward King of Queens would be without the laugh track? With the actors pausing for laughter every 45 seconds?

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 year ago

      You don’t even have to imagine it. Do a youtube search for clips with laugh tracks removed. They exist and it really makes watching it weird.

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’ve never done king of queens but friends and big bang theory without the laugh tracks are almost David Lynch levels of unsettling

  • ExLisper@linux.community
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I think the best way would be to re-record the audio. Laugh track usually overlaps the dialog a bit so it’s impossible to get rid of it. You just have to find some actors and have them read the script. The casts of most sitcons are not that big. You will need like what? 10 people? You can probably do it with your friends. Then just add some basic sound effects like door closing and cars starting. A bit of work but doable.

  • Sina@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t recommend doing this. The dialog is far worse with the awkward gaps of silence.

    I remember watching a few short vids on Youtube where people were making claims that Friends is unfunny garbage with out without the laugh track, but the truth is the awkward silences kill all jokes.

  • jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    Not really, unless you know a lot about sound engineering.

    I don’t think there’s any version of the show that doesn’t have a laugh track.

  • Gailthesnail
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    i need this to mute certain people in shows like debbie in shameless

    • James Kirk@startrek.website
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      She’s a pain but she’s also part of the family. I think it makes s very good point to make her like that and to have us bear her.

      • Gailthesnail
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        her voice is too fucking gross and nasty. i dont care about anything else about her she just needs to shut up

  • can@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    No doubt AI will be able to remove it soon if not already.

    Now the practicality of that is another matter.

  • Sina@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I don’t recommend doing this. The dialog is far worse with the awkward gaps of silence.

    I remember watching a few short vids on Youtube where people were making claims that Friends is unfunny garbage without without the laugh track, but the truth is the awkward silences kill all jokes.

        • Sina@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s exactly this! I was using the mlem app on iOS & it gave me a “posting error” message, so I tried a few times before giving up!

  • Sina@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t recommend doing this. The dialog is far worse with the awkward gaps of silence.

    I remember watching a few short vids on Youtube where people were making claims that Friends is unfunny garbage with out without the laugh track, but the truth is the awkward silences kill all jokes.

  • Sina@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t recommend doing this. The dialog is far worse with the awkward gaps of silence.

    I remember watching a few short vids on Youtube where people were making claims that Friends is unfunny garbage with out without the laugh track, but the truth is the awkward silences kill all jokes.

  • Sina@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t recommend doing this. The dialog is far worse with the awkward gaps of silence.

    I remember watching a few short vids on Youtube where people were making claims that Friends is unfunny garbage with out without the laugh track, but the truth is the awkward silences kill all jokes.