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My daughter is going to love this. Can anyone make out if songs like this are specially mastered with separate vocal channels? I’m guessing they’re not minus o

My daughter is going to love this. Can anyone make out if songs like this are specially mastered with separate vocal channels? I’m guessing they’re not minus ones that someone else has arranged and played. If these are coming from the original artist it’ll be interesting to know if they’re being uploaded as separate vocal channels or if Apple is applying ML to do voice isolation. Do any audio file formats support separate tracks with level info?

treis 4y ago
This is more or less just a Karaoke machine. Presumably Apple is getting the music from the same place they do.
rockostrich 4y ago
My guess is that they're doing it through ML. The old "cancel out the left track with the inverted right track" trick is probably good enough, but I don't see why Apple wouldn't take it one step further. > Do any audio file formats support separate tracks with level info? I don't know what file format audio engineering software uses to store all the track info but my guess is that it's akin to a zip file containing a flac for each track.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  > The old "cancel out the left track with the inverted right track" trick is probably good enough I've never had this produce good results. It removes major parts of the music, while also not fully removing the vocals.
- lostgame 4y ago
  I found out about this by having a poor headphone jack connection on a cassette walkman as a kid. I would actually take that and record out from that to another tape, so I could have 'instrumental' versions of the songs. And, no - it doesn't work very well at all; it sounds like a poor 64kbps MP3 with bizarre artifacts and; yes - many missing instruments.
the_other 4y ago
Native Instruments tried to popularise a four-track format for DJs but it didn’t spread far enough to take hold.
- lostgame 4y ago
  I was disappointed the .stem format never worked out. I actually had high hopes for that.
peatmoss 4y ago
I assume this comes along with “Mastered for iTunes” / “Apple Digital Masters” ah least in part. I think if it’s only available for limited tracks, we’ll know they went the full separate-the-vocal-track route. If it’s everything, then I bet they augmented with ML.
- copperx 4y ago
  We know that artists submit lyrics, but if they enable syllable-by-syllable highlighting for every song, it's probably ML.
MBCook 4y ago
I’m curious to see how they do it too. Presumably if they have Don’t Stop Believing and a separate karaoke karaoke today, they could basically cross fade between them for the adjustment of original singer vocals. And it would work better than trying to remove vocals after the fact. But that would require both versions, synchronizing them, and KNOWING which two tracks went together. Is that easier or harder than getting the labels to just give you a special version with an extra channel for vocals? Hopefully someone digs in and finds out once this is released.
- lostgame 4y ago
  >> Is that easier or harder than getting the labels to just give you a special version with an extra channel for vocals? Depends on the label and the artist. Could be easier, could be much harder. Sometimes multi-stems just don't exist anymore; were lost, have additional licensing issues; labels are a nightmare to deal with.
nkozyra 4y ago
Plenty of file formats support this, but they're generally for DAWs and not for a final mix. In order to support volume the file would have to be packed with each individual track. Almost assuredly this is just ML-assisted frequency separation.
- colmmacc 4y ago
  AAC is already interleaved multi-channel. Two-channel L/R is obviously very common for music, but spatial audio and Dolby Atmos comes with more channels (up to 128, which can be arranged and binned into "beds"). 5.1 (6 channels) and 7.1 (8 channels) are also common for video. Having dedicated/isolated vocal tracks as a channel very trivial in the format. I'd expect this is how it's done, and not ML, because Apple have already been driving mixing and end to end workflow with studios for Spatial audio and mastered for iTunes.
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    Channel and spatial/binaural tracks I'd expect, but separated tracks for instruments/vocals is a lot more time consuming and the kind of thing that studios/producers/masterers would bluster at enough that I wouldn't expect it to come close to giving Apple the volume they'd likely want. It absolutely could be done, I just think that Apple would want very good coverage and studios would be very slow to provide this format.
    - colmmacc 4y ago
      Apple need the labels either way. They can't just go creating new derived works without a license, and the artists and producers would far prefer to avoid the artifacts of something that is overly automated. It's already become pretty common for studios and labels to make stems available (stems are full multi-track files that can be used with a DAW) to industry insiders and even the public sometimes. There's a community of remixers, samplers, even a small cottage industry of YouTubers who work with these regularly. It wouldn't take them more than a few minutes per track to annotate which channel is vocals.
iicc 4y ago
>Can anyone make out if songs like this are specially mastered with separate vocal channels ... or if Apple is applying ML to do voice isolation "Coupled with an ever-expanding catalog that features tens of millions of the world’s most singable songs" "The vocal slider adjusts vocal volume, but does not fully remove vocals" Based on the quantity and results it's ML like Spleeter (https://research.deezer.com/projects/spleeter.html https://research.deezer.com/projects/spleeter.html).
- MBCook 4y ago
  Oh good catch on that last bit. I missed it when reading through.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
golergka 4y ago
> Do any audio file formats support separate tracks with level info? There is a 4-track an audio format developed by Native Instruments that is mostly used by DJs, and only dance music gets released in that. However, now that I search their website, there's no mention of it anymore — guess it wasn't popular enough with the labels to get any traction.

treis 4y ago

This is more or less just a Karaoke machine. Presumably Apple is getting the music from the same place they do.

rockostrich 4y ago

My guess is that they're doing it through ML. The old "cancel out the left track with the inverted right track" trick is probably good enough, but I don't see why Apple wouldn't take it one step further. > Do any audio file formats support separate tracks with level info? I don't know what file format audio engineering software uses to store all the track info but my guess is that it's akin to a zip file containing a flac for each track.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> The old "cancel out the left track with the inverted right track" trick is probably good enough I've never had this produce good results. It removes major parts of the music, while also not fully removing the vocals.
lostgame 4y ago
I found out about this by having a poor headphone jack connection on a cassette walkman as a kid. I would actually take that and record out from that to another tape, so I could have 'instrumental' versions of the songs. And, no - it doesn't work very well at all; it sounds like a poor 64kbps MP3 with bizarre artifacts and; yes - many missing instruments.

the_other 4y ago

Native Instruments tried to popularise a four-track format for DJs but it didn’t spread far enough to take hold.

lostgame 4y ago
I was disappointed the .stem format never worked out. I actually had high hopes for that.

peatmoss 4y ago

I assume this comes along with “Mastered for iTunes” / “Apple Digital Masters” ah least in part. I think if it’s only available for limited tracks, we’ll know they went the full separate-the-vocal-track route. If it’s everything, then I bet they augmented with ML.

copperx 4y ago
We know that artists submit lyrics, but if they enable syllable-by-syllable highlighting for every song, it's probably ML.

MBCook 4y ago

I’m curious to see how they do it too. Presumably if they have Don’t Stop Believing and a separate karaoke karaoke today, they could basically cross fade between them for the adjustment of original singer vocals. And it would work better than trying to remove vocals after the fact. But that would require both versions, synchronizing them, and KNOWING which two tracks went together. Is that easier or harder than getting the labels to just give you a special version with an extra channel for vocals? Hopefully someone digs in and finds out once this is released.

lostgame 4y ago
>> Is that easier or harder than getting the labels to just give you a special version with an extra channel for vocals? Depends on the label and the artist. Could be easier, could be much harder. Sometimes multi-stems just don't exist anymore; were lost, have additional licensing issues; labels are a nightmare to deal with.

nkozyra 4y ago

Plenty of file formats support this, but they're generally for DAWs and not for a final mix. In order to support volume the file would have to be packed with each individual track. Almost assuredly this is just ML-assisted frequency separation.

colmmacc 4y ago
AAC is already interleaved multi-channel. Two-channel L/R is obviously very common for music, but spatial audio and Dolby Atmos comes with more channels (up to 128, which can be arranged and binned into "beds"). 5.1 (6 channels) and 7.1 (8 channels) are also common for video. Having dedicated/isolated vocal tracks as a channel very trivial in the format. I'd expect this is how it's done, and not ML, because Apple have already been driving mixing and end to end workflow with studios for Spatial audio and mastered for iTunes.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  Channel and spatial/binaural tracks I'd expect, but separated tracks for instruments/vocals is a lot more time consuming and the kind of thing that studios/producers/masterers would bluster at enough that I wouldn't expect it to come close to giving Apple the volume they'd likely want. It absolutely could be done, I just think that Apple would want very good coverage and studios would be very slow to provide this format.
  - colmmacc 4y ago
    Apple need the labels either way. They can't just go creating new derived works without a license, and the artists and producers would far prefer to avoid the artifacts of something that is overly automated. It's already become pretty common for studios and labels to make stems available (stems are full multi-track files that can be used with a DAW) to industry insiders and even the public sometimes. There's a community of remixers, samplers, even a small cottage industry of YouTubers who work with these regularly. It wouldn't take them more than a few minutes per track to annotate which channel is vocals.

iicc 4y ago

>Can anyone make out if songs like this are specially mastered with separate vocal channels ... or if Apple is applying ML to do voice isolation "Coupled with an ever-expanding catalog that features tens of millions of the world’s most singable songs" "The vocal slider adjusts vocal volume, but does not fully remove vocals" Based on the quantity and results it's ML like Spleeter (https://research.deezer.com/projects/spleeter.html https://research.deezer.com/projects/spleeter.html).

MBCook 4y ago
Oh good catch on that last bit. I missed it when reading through.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

golergka 4y ago

> Do any audio file formats support separate tracks with level info? There is a 4-track an audio format developed by Native Instruments that is mostly used by DJs, and only dance music gets released in that. However, now that I search their website, there's no mention of it anymore — guess it wasn't popular enough with the labels to get any traction.