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Apple Music Sing

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Re: Apple Music Sing

#81

Post by hunter2_ »

notpushkin wrote: post #75

People will definitely rip no-vocal versions out of there (if they are good quality, that is). I see some pretty neat implications: - Young artists can (illegally) use beats by popular producers. Young producers can listen to various tracks and better understand some techniques that were shadowed by vocals before. - More bootleg remixes of popular tracks. Things that weren't possible by just slicing and sampling the…

Back in the day, we just took a channel differential (L minus R) with one channel high passed so the difference didn't have all the bass eliminated.

Tons of reasons it sucked: stereo reverb on vocals wouldn't cancel out, other instruments panned dead center (or at least highly correlated) would cancel out along with the vocal, and early MP3 encoders often sounded better in "joint stereo" or "intensity stereo" mode (assuming low/mid bitrates) which very reasonably gave more bits to the center and fewer bits to the sides, so the differential sounded like hot garbage.

Exciting to see that this technique has been replaced with ML.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#82

Post by racl101 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #48
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 came here with that question, why don't they call this karaoke? Wondered if "karaoke" is trademarked? (or patented?!) It doesn't seem to me likely that they didn't think their audience would know the word "karaoke" at this point, but I don't know.

Cause Karaoke has cheesy or corny perception. Have you ever seen those cringe looking karaoke CD compilations of famous songs. They always look cheap.

And if Apple knows anything is how to market / rebrand the same old shit and sell it to the masses at really marked up prices for profit.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#83

Post by manmal »

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…

This is not only about vocals suppression, but also about visualizing timing (displaying when each syllable should be sung). Many songs have weirdly timed bridges where it's not clear when singing will resume. And some people are just not good at timing - having a visual timing clue will help there.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#84

Post by soylentcola »

batesy wrote: post #49
colmmacc wrote: post #11

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…

Serato just released Stems, which allows DJs to isolate drums, bassline, vocals in the tracks they are playing live. The algos are getting pretty damn good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2Wy9szxU3A

I remember seeing something like this in VirtualDJ the last time I fired it up and updated a few years ago. Only noticed because they'd remapped the high/mid/low EQ knobs on my old Numark controller to remove bass, drums, vox, etc.

Wasn't what I was looking for initially but it was surprisingly good compared to the older "vocal remover" type plugins I remember having for Winamp et al back in the day. If I ever actually DJed anymore it would definitely be useful for mixing tracks.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#85

Post by whistl034 »

It's a cool feature, even if you're just reading along.

Our Amazon Echo Show started doing this recently when listening to songs on Amazon's own Music service. I noticed it, thought it was interesting, commented once to the wife, then went back to just listening.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#86

Post by JohnBooty »

joegahona wrote: post #67
hamburglar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know, @hamburglar -- judging by just the comments in this thread, it wasn't so obvious to others. And "real-time lyrics" is _already_ in Apple Music. In your/Apple's defense, the photo they included is pretty clear what's going on. Important to note the footnote on the page -- this isn't even full-fledged karaoke: "The vocal slider adjusts vocal volume, but does not fully remove vocals." I'm being nitpicky fo…

     And "real-time lyrics" is _already_ in Apple Music.
Currently, Apple Music lyrics are synced to the current line of lyrics (if the lyrics metadata supports it)

This new feature appears to sync the lyrics to the current word of lyrics, which is what karaoke usually does. Not sure how big a deal that is to folks looking to do their own vocals.

I'm curious about how they're doing that word-for-word timing. Hardcoded metadata? ML? Is it a simple interpolation based on the existing line-by-line timing?

Re: Apple Music Sing

#87

Post by lostgame »

rockostrich wrote: post #4
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…

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…

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.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#89

Post by diebeforei485 »

notpushkin wrote: post #75

People will definitely rip no-vocal versions out of there (if they are good quality, that is). I see some pretty neat implications: - Young artists can (illegally) use beats by popular producers. Young producers can listen to various tracks and better understand some techniques that were shadowed by vocals before. - More bootleg remixes of popular tracks. Things that weren't possible by just slicing and sampling the…

Perhaps that is why it's not available on Mac.

Of course people can still rip it off an iPhone/iPad through the "analog hole" via the Lightning to 3.5mm adapter

Re: Apple Music Sing

#90

Post by dagmx »

alewi481 wrote: post #39
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.

It seems that limiting new headline software features to the latest hardware release is the direction that Apple is going lately. The most recent examples that comes to mind are the always-on display in the new iPhone 14 and the hover mode in the new iPad Pro.

Listing always on display as just a software feature is odd. It’s very much a function of both software and hardware.

It requires new screens and display controllers that can refresh at much lower rates, and stronger guarantees of burn in prevention.

Like sure, you could do it on an older screen but you’d burn through battery much quicker and potentially damage the device in the process.

This is true for Android devices as well.

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