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Apple Music Sing

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Re: Apple Music Sing

#121

Post by CharlesW »

imwillofficial wrote: post #69

It’s not that Apple services lack polish, they are usually great. It’s that they feel incongruent.

Apple services sometimes seem incongruent because they are. Other times they're experiments (which can and do fail), or windows into far larger projects. For example, QuickTime for Windows 3.0 was a product of porting significant chunks of pre-NeXT MacOS to x86¹, which was eventually leveraged for Carbon².

¹ http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.17/17.01/20... ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

Re: Apple Music Sing

#122

Post by brookst »

jaywalk wrote: post #97
imchillyb wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but... Look at the list of what Apple Sing includes: Adjustable vocals: Users now have control over a song’s vocal levels. They can sing with the original artist vocals, take the lead, or mix it up on millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog. Real-time lyrics: Users can sing along to their favorite songs with animated lyrics that dance to the rhythm of the vocals. Background vocals: Vocal lines sung simul…

They don't state anything explicitly referring to real-time processing of the songs. As a matter of fact, calling out "millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog" actually makes it seem like the adjustable vocals will only be available on certain songs that they've added support for.

It's hard for me to imagine they'd do something special to support "millions of songs" while excluding others, since the entire catalog is ~100m songs.

My guess is that it's entirely dynamic. It's hard to imagine the complexity of doing batch processing to render each song in the library, and maintain that as new songs are uploaded, and update the renders for software improvements. Better to just do it realtime.

And since classical, instrumentals, esoteric ambient stuff, death metal, etc, will probably not be supported by the algorithms, I think the "millions" refers to those that can be processed in realtime.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#123

Post by kevincox »

hunter2_ wrote: post #106
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…

Karaoke is where some other artist performs and records the song, without vocals, in the style of whoever popularized the song. This Apple feature seems to be where the same popular recording gets used, which has vocals, and then some magic processing reduces the vocals. There has always been software to sorta-kinda suppress vocals from existing recordings, but it usually ends up sounding like trash (artifacts of all…

Is it? I've never taken karaoke to mean covers. Often it is the original soundtrack with the vocals suppressed (sometimes well via remastering and sometimes poorly with an equalizer).

To me karaoke is just signing to music, which is exactly what this is. I found it very strange that they avoided that word.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#124

Post by notpushkin »

ShamelessC wrote: post #101
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…

If it's realtime, and you are mixing vocals and other separated tracks back together on-the-fly, the actual separations don't need to be _super_ hiqh quality, as the mixing will mask most deficiencies. The reason I say that is because I suspect they are doing this with a neural net.

I think a neural net would be an overkill here. If you are doing the mixing on device, I think the algorithm could be as simple as just overlaying two tracks.

Splitting tracks on-device would probably use a neural net, but I don't think they're doing that.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#125

Post by kitsunesoba »

rsynnott wrote: post #52

Does it have an option to enable blocky white-on-blue text, and some sort of incredibly fiddly and awkward UI, for that authentic karaoke experience?

Gotta have the completely unrelated 80s/90s stock video footage playing in the background too.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#126

Post by Not15CharsLong »

JohnBooty wrote: post #107
Not15CharsLong wrote: post #79

Interesting yet very anti-competitive move by Apple. There are lots and lots of existing providers of karaoke tracks: these invest (depending on quality) between several dollars and several hundreds of dollars to record "soundalike" tracks Sales of such tracks do not generate royalties for the original performer, but do pay out to the composer (per track sale and for things like public performance). Apple is now garr…

There are lots and lots of existing providers of karaoke tracks: these invest (depending on quality) between several dollars and several hundreds of dollars to record "soundalike" tracks Commercial karaoke establishments will still need to pay for the licensed versions if they want to be legal. That doesn't change. People who don't want to do that already had tons of options - Adobe Audition and tons of other softwar…

Commercial karaoke establishments are, outside Japan and Korea, not very relevant.

The at-home market in the UK, on the other hand, is pretty significant. None of these households know how to operate Adobe Audition or something similar: they just want to sing along with whatever is on the telly*.

There are lots of companies catering to that market. In fact: in the past, Apple was more than happy to allow them on their platform, to fill in the gaps left by Apple's inability to negotiate certain agreements.

In the past year or so, Apple has gotten more and more restrictive with regards to "soundalike" content. And we now know why... Is this inevitable? Possibly. Is it fair? Maybe. Is it yet another cottage industry that Apple strangulates? Definitely.

*And yes, this is a very simplistic caricature by choice. Of course UK consumers are more sophisticated, but...

Re: Apple Music Sing

#127

Post by busymom0 »

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.

Just like they don’t allow always on display for iPhones prior to the latest 14.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#128

Post by kevincox »

CrypticShift wrote: post #73

I'm kind of disappointed at the priorities of these streaming services. I guess I'm not in the mainstream, music-consumption-wise. After all, it makes sense. If you want to engage subscribers to your service, what else would you do? How most people engage with recorded music? Well, they just… sing along… I'm also curious (like some on this thread) how they are technically separating the vocals. Is this yet another pr…

I'm honestly more surprised the other way. I can't believe it took this long for them to offer even a basic karaoke experience. I thought this would be an obvious feature.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#129

Post by Y-bar »

racl101 wrote: post #82
jrochkind1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even to an introvert like me, the cheesiness and being corny is part of what makes karaoke so good, it has an automatic atmosphere where you are allowed to do badly because we can all laugh at ourselves.

Polish and perfection makes this less appealing to me. Makes it feel up-tight and a bit snobby.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#130

Post by brookst »

zorrolovsky wrote: post #80
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.

> either push users to upgrade devices, or push to sign up to paid services. Pushing for both at the same time is greedy. Pushing users to upgrade devices is unethical and harmful. Apple does it all the time and they should be held accountable for that. Discarding old devices and creating new ones destroys the environment and increases pollution. The best device is the device you already own! Their successful busines…

Apple products have longer lifespans than competitors'[0]. There's just a secondary market, which is more environmentally efficient. It's a very different world, so it's understandable that people not in the Apple ecosystem see "buy a new iPad" as synonymous with "throw old iPad in trash." But that's not what happens at all. The actual devices go on being used for a very long time.

But ignoring that for a moment, are you proposing that companies shouldn't improve hardware because it leads to software features that don't work on old devices, which leads to old devices being thrown away? That doesn't feel right to me.

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181016142434.h...

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