The big advantage of using raw audio is that there's an abundance of data (all the music that's ever been released pretty easily scraped from the internet), whe

The big advantage of using raw audio is that there's an abundance of data (all the music that's ever been released pretty easily scraped from the internet), whereas "semantic" data is rare, expensive and of lower quality (as in: not as good/catchy). The best solution is probably to extract the semantic representation from raw/pcm form. (Incidentally, I'm working on this very problem. Anyone interested, feel free to contact me)