5 ms·

Yeah, interesting point. Depending on how granular someone wants to get, you can break a session for any given pop record into upwards of 60+ channels. Drum ki

Yeah, interesting point. Depending on how granular someone wants to get, you can break a session for any given pop record into upwards of 60+ channels. Drum kits in particular are among the most complicated instruments and can have anywhere from 3-16 channels dedicated to it. It's not uncommon to use three microphones to capture different aspects of the kick drum alone: 1) Inside the kick by the beater, 2) outside the kick by the resonant head and 3) a mic that captures the subby "chest" frequencies that you only feel in your body. Additionally, certain groups of instruments have interdependent relationships that react to one another. For example when the kick drum hits, the bass might "duck down" out of the way (temporarily) so that they aren't occupying the same sonic space. This dynamic relationship between instruments helps to make a song groove more and have greater impact. Any given song could have numerous dynamic relationships like this that are set up by the audio engineer. Some of the magic or "vibe" of a given recording can go away when you selectively mute or disable certain instrument groups. Sometimes the only option you have to preserve that exact balance between the instruments is to print the stereo buss. Printing the instruemnts individually can kill the vibe.

viraptor 6y ago
What I read is: if we had a sufficiently advanced format which can embed both the recording and ... "sound shaders" (effectively) we could totally do that. And I'd love to see that.
- endymi0n 6y ago
  We have that already, it's the native save format of the DAWs. But there we don't just dive into the specifics of audio, but also back to an analogy that's closer to software developers. Bouncing a full track to stereo is a lot like compiling software into bytecode/assembly. You get something usable and distributable to end users that you can reverse only partially. Part of that is intended. Just as with proprietary software, the exact combination of synthesizers, instruments, plugins and settings are closely guarded secrets of musicians, mixing and mastering studios. And just like in software, some of those "shaders" aka plugins are actually proprietary themselves and can cost multiple hundred dollars each — so redistributing the "source code" can be not just difficult but actually illegal or impossible. As you see, the incentives generally aren't aligned towards this form of distribution. Just like in software though, I think there's a set of people interested in actually distributing their source tracks, made with open source software — and IIRC, that's exactly what's happening here as the base of these source separation efforts!
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Yeah, DAWs are pretty close, but I was thinking of distribution itself. Basically a PDF, but for music. You don't necessarily need to ship all the original bits to generate the optimised postscript - just the postscript which will display the same thing everywhere.
    - djeiasbsbo 6y ago
      > Yeah, DAWs are pretty close, but I was thinking of distribution itself. Basically a PDF, but for music. You don't necessarily need to ship all the original bits to generate the optimised postscript - just the postscript which will display the same thing everywhere. I think this could be done, probably easier than doing the same for video production. An audio signal is as simple as just a list of values... Basically, we would just have every "channel"/"track" from a digital audio workstation rendered into a file. For very similar tracks only the differences need to be stored. Then we would also need one "master" channel which stores mastering information. Now such a format would pose a couple of challenges. First of all, size. Lossless audio in flac takes quite a bit of space already, an entire album is usually around 100mb. This would use even more space. The next problem is that there would have to be a "standard" across digital audio workstations... how would tracks be classified? For example, the software Ableton Live allows one to group tracks and also group groups themselves. Effects can be added to groups but this people also use this feature just for organisational reasons. Other software might do this differently... Then the next thing which is probably the biggest challenge... the "player" would need to add the individual signals back together during playback and doing this in real time can cost performance. All in all, I have been dreaming for years about managing songs and audio projects with something like git. It would open up a whole new world for collaboration and I think theoretically it would be possible.
- lrem 6y ago
  I wonder how long would adoption take. The hardware and software progress around sound seems to be way slower than around image. Which is understandable, as thanks to the lower data rates stuff has been "good enough" for a long time.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  That is one way to do it. I wonder if you couldn't apply the effects to the tracks themselves. Take tracks A and B. If the final audio track is composited as λ(αA+βB), perhaps you could save λ(αA) and λ(βB) as separate tracks in the file to be composited as λ(αA)+λ(βB). That assumes λ is linear, but you can likely cheat a bit to make it work on non-linear functions as well. But once you start going down that route, you need to assume that the player will mix those perfectly, and looking at history, I wouldn't take that for granted. Some shader compilers are buggy, imagine what would happen on low-power HW, I guess it can only be done reliably if you control the player as well.

viraptor 6y ago

What I read is: if we had a sufficiently advanced format which can embed both the recording and ... "sound shaders" (effectively) we could totally do that. And I'd love to see that.

endymi0n 6y ago
We have that already, it's the native save format of the DAWs. But there we don't just dive into the specifics of audio, but also back to an analogy that's closer to software developers. Bouncing a full track to stereo is a lot like compiling software into bytecode/assembly. You get something usable and distributable to end users that you can reverse only partially. Part of that is intended. Just as with proprietary software, the exact combination of synthesizers, instruments, plugins and settings are closely guarded secrets of musicians, mixing and mastering studios. And just like in software, some of those "shaders" aka plugins are actually proprietary themselves and can cost multiple hundred dollars each — so redistributing the "source code" can be not just difficult but actually illegal or impossible. As you see, the incentives generally aren't aligned towards this form of distribution. Just like in software though, I think there's a set of people interested in actually distributing their source tracks, made with open source software — and IIRC, that's exactly what's happening here as the base of these source separation efforts!
- viraptor 6y ago
  Yeah, DAWs are pretty close, but I was thinking of distribution itself. Basically a PDF, but for music. You don't necessarily need to ship all the original bits to generate the optimised postscript - just the postscript which will display the same thing everywhere.
  - djeiasbsbo 6y ago
    > Yeah, DAWs are pretty close, but I was thinking of distribution itself. Basically a PDF, but for music. You don't necessarily need to ship all the original bits to generate the optimised postscript - just the postscript which will display the same thing everywhere. I think this could be done, probably easier than doing the same for video production. An audio signal is as simple as just a list of values... Basically, we would just have every "channel"/"track" from a digital audio workstation rendered into a file. For very similar tracks only the differences need to be stored. Then we would also need one "master" channel which stores mastering information. Now such a format would pose a couple of challenges. First of all, size. Lossless audio in flac takes quite a bit of space already, an entire album is usually around 100mb. This would use even more space. The next problem is that there would have to be a "standard" across digital audio workstations... how would tracks be classified? For example, the software Ableton Live allows one to group tracks and also group groups themselves. Effects can be added to groups but this people also use this feature just for organisational reasons. Other software might do this differently... Then the next thing which is probably the biggest challenge... the "player" would need to add the individual signals back together during playback and doing this in real time can cost performance. All in all, I have been dreaming for years about managing songs and audio projects with something like git. It would open up a whole new world for collaboration and I think theoretically it would be possible.
lrem 6y ago
I wonder how long would adoption take. The hardware and software progress around sound seems to be way slower than around image. Which is understandable, as thanks to the lower data rates stuff has been "good enough" for a long time.
MayeulC 6y ago
That is one way to do it. I wonder if you couldn't apply the effects to the tracks themselves. Take tracks A and B. If the final audio track is composited as λ(αA+βB), perhaps you could save λ(αA) and λ(βB) as separate tracks in the file to be composited as λ(αA)+λ(βB). That assumes λ is linear, but you can likely cheat a bit to make it work on non-linear functions as well. But once you start going down that route, you need to assume that the player will mix those perfectly, and looking at history, I wouldn't take that for granted. Some shader compilers are buggy, imagine what would happen on low-power HW, I guess it can only be done reliably if you control the player as well.