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Apple Music Sing

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Re: Apple Music Sing

#231

Post by jadbox »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #194
misterprime wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The at-home karaoke experience is pretty horrible. Companies put a high price tag on access to limited catalogs with hit and miss quality. Oftentimes, the musical bed is low quality midi music and the lyrics may or may not be timed properly. I'm thrilled to see this announcement and will likely buy my first Apple TV because of it and switch my Pandora subscription to Apple Music.

> The at-home karaoke experience is pretty horrible As long as you have a 0 latency Mic setup then just that and YouTube searching Karaoke versions with AdBlocker works beautifully.

any specific recommendations for a setup?

Re: Apple Music Sing

#232

Post by smoldesu »

notpushkin wrote: post #229
smoldesu wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this enable anything that wasn't possible before?

Perhaps I'm missing something, but without a remix pack, how would you take vocals and overlay those on top of a completely rewritten track for example, or bite a particular sample from the track that only plays with vocals on top?

There are a couple ways. The method most musicians have used since the mid-90s is phase cancellation, where you take an instrumental and use it to cancel out any sound that isn't instrumental (a-la noise-cancelling). In more dire scenarios, people would split the stereo tracks and cancel them against one another, which actually worked fairly well if you had a DAW precise enough to pull it off.

Then in the mid-2000s there were a few attempts to use algorithms for this (that mostly failed) and circa-2015 we started to see machine-learning based options like Spleeter and Demucs. This is what Apple is implementing here, and it's been freely available for years. It's not really novel for anyone who isn't writing their music on an iPhone.

I mostly ask because I've spent the past 2 or 3 weeks working on a remix album, and haven't really had trouble finding stem separation tools that work well.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#233

Post by dkonofalski »

tsimionescu wrote: post #198
Destitute wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I think karaoke, I think microphone. It appears this makes no use of a microphone or captures the singer's vocals in any way, it just isolates the instrumental tracks and eliminates or reduces the vocal track. A microphone (and ideally having your own vocals mixed with the audio output) is the core feature of karaoke, not playing an instrumental version of the song.

The whole point is that you can sing with it, which implies it can capture your voice in some way, even if you aren't holding a microphone.

Singing with something doesn't imply anything about capture. It's just saying that I can sing along to songs without the original vocal while I'm washing the dishes in the kitchen or whatever.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#234

Post by mihaaly »

mihaaly wrote: post #63
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.

Probably some would choose not to upgrade devices and not to sign up to services and then they could put their greed where it belongs. I am getting fed up by the user hostile attitude of producers and providers, maybe I will just keep my money or spend elsewhere.

... it is very peculiar that when I write a less than flattering thing about Apple, even when it is just partly relevant, certain people start to downvote my opinion. Only when it is about Apple btw, do not happen about something else.

Weird kind of devotees.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#235

Post by spfzero »

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.

They're adding it to Apple Music for no extra cost this time though.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#236

Post by CharlesW »

simondw wrote: post #167
CharlesW wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Often it is the original soundtrack with the vocals suppressed (sometimes well via remastering and sometimes poorly with an equalizer). Properly licensed karaoke tracks are covers, because licensing custom remixes of original tracks is prohibitive. There are sites where you can buy stems/backing tracks of any song you can think of, which are reproductions by talented musicians. https://www.karaoke-version.com/custo…

That feels like an accidental, not essential, property of karaoke. I doubt anyone who enjoys karaoke would reject a track recorded by the original artist because it wasn't a cover by someone they'd never heard of.

> That feels like an accidental, not essential, property of karaoke.

Regardless of whether you believe it's an "essential property", that karaoke music often sounds cheesy is one of several reasons Apple wouldn't want Apple Music Sing to be associated with it.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#237

Post by patentatt »

layer8 wrote: post #180
crazygringo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not explicit, but from the descriptions it seems to suggest it's performing recognition of the audio streams of what's being sung, and even supports dual streams for duets. So I wouldn't be surprised if it relies on a particular hardware chip that the older Apple TV simply doesn't have. That has definitely been the case for everything Apple has launched with regards to Spatial Audio.

They may also use ML to sync the lyrics to the vocals, meaning they don’t need prior timestamp metadata for the syllables.

I hope they don't do this. It would be so wasteful to have every end user device running an ML model every time a song is played. Just run the model once in the datacenter and then distribute the time stamp metadata.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#238

Post by dylan604 »

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.

Sing Different.

It's what the marketing machine at Apple does.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#240

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

Sound separation is incredible lately, even the free options. I'm sure Apples tested their model against songs likely to be sung. I'm sure it sounds great.

The real surprise is that the artists are ok with this, they must be getting compensated.

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