Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Music Sing

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 316 posts

Re: Apple Music Sing

#11

Post by colmmacc »

This looks really cool, and it'll be interesting to see how artists and producers react. Presumably the tracks need to be mixed for the format with dedicated vocal track. Although it's possible to isolate vocals some of the time from mixes, using stereo separation (the vocals are often the only component that is 100% center mixed), filtering, and even AI techniques ... none are perfect.

I wonder if this will have the real killer feature of professional karaoke ... the ability to transpose the song into a more convenient key for the singer. Apple have had this capability in Logic Pro's pitch shift and it's pretty good even on polyphonic music. Some Karaoke platforms use midi and midi-like formats and synthesize the instruments to do it, but I'd be surprised to see that here.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#12

Post by JohnBooty »

This could really revolutionize amateur music.

Having easy access to instrumental versions of millions of tracks will be huge for remixers, people recording vocal demos, etc.

...well, maybe.

I'm sure you won't be able to export the vocal-less versions out to an audio file directly.

But you should be able to turn off the vocals and capture the resulting audio by the usual means: loopback audio drivers, analog capture, etc. It's still a step, but it's going to be fairly easy and the resulting file should be quite clean.

(It's also going to revolutionize the singing I do alone after a few glasses of wine but that's not super impactful to anybody but me)

Re: Apple Music Sing

#13

Post by fuzzy2 »

Good, now maybe Spotify will up their lyrics game. It’s sometimes great but often mediocre at best.

I also really miss the days when Singstar was a thing, or even UltraStar, the open source “clone”.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#14

Post by copperx »

peatmoss wrote: post #9
sudhirj wrote: post #2

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 sep…

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.

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

Re: Apple Music Sing

#15

Post by MBCook »

sudhirj wrote: post #2

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 sep…

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.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#17

Post by codazoda »

Weird that this is new. I’ve seen it multiple times over the past few months. Maybe I got opted into a test group or something. I activated it by accident several times and ignored it because I primarily use Apple Music when I’m driving.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#18

Post by surewe »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #8

> and can be enjoyed on iPhone, iPad, and the new Apple TV 4K But the old Apple TV 4K is not powerful enough for displaying text on a TV, even though any old iPhone is? I get that they want to push device and service adoption but they should pick a lane, either push users to upgrade devices, or push to sign up to paid services. Pushing for both at the same time is greedy.

I'd imagine/hope that it's also supported on the previous generation, just that they'd rather advertise its usage on the new one.

Edit: per the bottom of the page...

> Apple Music Sing will be available on all compatible iPhone and iPad models as well as the new Apple TV 4K.

:/ maybe they do ML to process stuff on-device, per other comments' speculation, that justifies requiring the newer model?

Re: Apple Music Sing

#19

Post by MBCook »

JohnBooty wrote: post #12

This could really revolutionize amateur music. Having easy access to instrumental versions of millions of tracks will be huge for remixers, people recording vocal demos, etc. ...well, maybe. I'm sure you won't be able to export the vocal-less versions out to an audio file directly. But you should be able to turn off the vocals and capture the resulting audio by the usual means: loopback audio drivers, analog capture,…

It’s not what this is for, but I’ve often thought it would be kind of nice to be able to just put Apple Music in a “instrumental“ mode.

The easy way would be if it knew which tracks were instrumental or not and only play those. The GREAT way would be if it just played everything but knew how to remove the all vocals by playing just the backing track.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#20

Post by hamburglar »

joegahona wrote: post #5

Is this akin to karaoke? (The word never appears on the page.) > Apple today announced Apple Music Sing, an exciting new feature that allows users to sing along to their favorite songs with adjustable vocals1 and real-time lyrics. Users can already "sing along to their favorite songs" -- this feels like a wasted opportunity in the first sentence to explain the differentiator. It feels like they're misusing/misunderst…

I agree with “show don’t tell” as a general rule for effectiveness in cases like this, but I find it really hard to believe anyone is going to read this and not immediately grasp what is meant by “with adjustable vocals and real-time lyrics”. Obviously you can already sing along, and the question about how this makes it better is answered within the same sentence.
Post reply on HN