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Apple Music Sing

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Re: Apple Music Sing

#301

Post by Reubend »

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.

You don't need an ad blocker if you just pay for YouTube premium. Often times I see people complaining about ads there, but I think ads are necessary for users who aren't paying for the product.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#302

Post by Grazester »

reaperducer wrote: post #172
Thorrez wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense when there's audio that Apple hasn't seen before. With Apple Music Sing, it makes more sense to do that processing once in the datacenter.

it makes more sense to do that processing once in the datacenter. Since Apple is all about on-device processing with so many of its features, going back-and-forth to the data center doesn't seem to be its style these days. That's more of a Google thing. And no one can accuse Apple of telling its advertisers that you start your day with Funky Cold Medina.

A lot of Android processing is done on the device now.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#303

Post by kalleboo »

CharlesW wrote: post #139
kevincox wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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's not an essential component of Karaoke though. I live in Japan where Karaoke is extremely popular, and in the more higher-end karaoke systems, you can pick the original music for popular songs (or sometimes you can even pick live performances with the video of the artist on stage and everything)

Re: Apple Music Sing

#304

Post by idontwantthis »

jadbox wrote: post #231
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

JBL partybox and any wired microphone.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#305

Post by idontwantthis »

misterprime wrote: post #177
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…

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

A smart tv, a microphone and a speaker? Or get a karaoke microphone with a built in speaker.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#306

Post by techdragon »

puglr wrote: post #272
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.

I spent a couple years on the YouTube Music team, adjacent to the folks who handled the nightmare that is music rights and licensing. It was explained to me that the reason YouTube didn't offer a karaoke feature -- despite having licenses to a lot of lyrics -- is that karaoke is considered a separate license. Even if you license both the recording and the lyrics, combining them into a karaoke feature isn't on the tab…

This sort of ultra-divided and litigious licensing rights regime that I suspect is why music hasn't yet had a GPT-3/DALLe style machine learning breakthrough that has captured the public's imagination.

Given the monumental size of fastidiously annotated music corpuses available, the quite diligent and far more agreed upon systematisation of various forms of scientific description of musical forms, and the arguably simpler space than some of the more recent advances like 3d object generation and the sophisticated artistic output from the latest 2d image generating models... seems rather odd music has no wildly popular machine learning model, something i could ask "give me 5 minutes of synth-wave by Mozart" or "Prodigy's Firestarter, but without the lyrics"...

... My suspicion is that the entire endeavour is tortured by licensing and at every turn must avoid ever sounding like music that could be owned by someone else, and as a consequence cannot be "popular" as it must be crippled and limited, built to at all costs avoid ever sounding like Taylor Swift, Queen, Aerosmith, et al.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#307

Post by golergka »

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…

> 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.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#308

Post by Closi »

notpushkin wrote: post #209
Closi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Apple says it is] relying on an on-device machine learning algorithm that processes the music in real-time. The tech builds on Apple’s noise-cancellation expertise and other developments it’s made for FaceTime, the company said. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/06/apple-music-is-getting-a-n...

I stand corrected as well! Wonder why they take this approach though, as it is clearly over-engineering (if I correctly understand that the goal is just to make vocals volume adjustable).

> Wonder why they take this approach though, as it is clearly over-engineering (if I correctly understand that the goal is just to make vocals volume adjustable).

Depends what the other non-functional requirements were. i.e. if the NFRs were as follows:

* Cannot increase bandwidth / mobile data usage.

* Cannot impact music quality / bitrate.

* Has to work offline.

* Cannot increase on-device storage.

* Has to be responsive.

Then two audio streams might not work.

Another advantage of doing it on-device is that it doesn't actually change any of the backend architecture too. It might be a lot of change to a lot of systems for a feature which only adds a small amount of functionality - i.e. architecting your entire backend and streaming around seperating audio tracks might not be the right focus.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#309

Post by jessriedel »

hunter2_ wrote: post #297
jessriedel wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Karaoke is where some other artist performs and records the song, without vocals, in the style of whoever popularized the song. No, this just isn't what the word means, either popularly or in technical usage. I can't find any dictionary that restricts karaoke to covers, and if anything the dictionary emphasizes non -covers: > an act of singing along to a music video, especially one from which the original vocals ha…

I'll admit that I'm coming at it from a Western perspective: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaoke#Production_methods I agree that it's not what the word inherently means, but it's the typical situation (which is effectively like meaning) where I am (USA).

I'm also coming at it from a Western perspective, and I agree that in the US karaoke audio tracks are usually covers. But the typical situation is not effectively like meaning. Tables are typically not made of gold, because that's so expensive, but if you show someone a solid-gold table they will not be unsure whether it's a table. The defining features of tables have to do with form and function, not the chemical composition. (In fact, if we can even go to the extreme of considering a hypothetical single-piece diamond table, which presumably has never existed. If one were created, everyone would instantly recognize it as a table.)

See the many examples (in the West) of tools that remove vocals from audio tracks; they are ubiquitously described as useful for creating karaoke audio tracks:

https://vocalremover.org/

https://tunebat.com/Vocal-Remover

https://www.conversion-tool.com/karaoke/

https://www.songpeel.com/song-to-karaoke

Re: Apple Music Sing

#310

Post by JohnBooty »

Not15CharsLong wrote: post #126
JohnBooty wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

Thank you for explaining that.

I didn't realize there was a commercial home market for those professionally produced karaoke tracks.

If I'm understanding things somewhat correctly now, this does sound like it will be a large blow to that market.

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