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Apple Music Sing

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Re: Apple Music Sing

#211

Post by yamtaddle »

reaperducer wrote: post #193
racl101 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, even if executed well, who is this for? I know the last thing I want is for some random person to sing the song we're all listening to given that most people can't sing. I find myself usually telling the kids in the car to pipe down and let the artist sing. So I'm really interested in understanding the demo for this feature.

I find myself usually telling the kids in the car to pipe down and let the artist sing. It seems that your kids are the intended target. Kids love to sing along with music. You've already discovered that. You must not have 10 to 12-year-old girls. Put a couple of them in a room, and eventually they'll start singing.

Yeah, the huge number of "sing-along versions" of movies on Disney+ make it pretty clear what at least one major target market for this is. See also: the overwhelming majority of home-karaoke devices that are purchased. Most of the market's shitty overpriced devices that barely work, aimed at kids. This replaces those with something way the hell better, on a device that also does a bunch of other stuff.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#212

Post by WorldMaker »

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.

IANAL but Karaoke has been trademarked in different decades in different countries. Most of those trademarks are considered "Abandoned" according to the few databases I skimmed in a brief search, but that covered only a couple of countries.

I think most US courts would see "karaoke" as a generic word today, but I don't know about courts outside of the US, and Karaoke is still seen as a part of the "trade dress" of a couple specific US corporations even if they can't entirely protect that trademark, they are still allowed to fight for it. At least a couple seem to still exist primarily as trolls for lawsuits today.

According to the toy aisle of US stores, "Sing" (and "Sing Along") is the only real generic English term in use, and very few (no?) current toys use the word "Karaoke", so I'm guessing those trolls are still winning in the US, for now. (Again, I don't know about the rest of the world, and toy branding is an anecdotal source at best, but still an interesting proxy view in how much large companies assume they will be sued.)

Re: Apple Music Sing

#213

Post by insane_dreamer »

manv1 wrote: post #170

This is going to be another new way for people to generate content for TikTok. Great idea, actually. How does the mic situation work? Will you need a USB mic? Can you use a BT headset?

I would assume it uses the phone's built-in mic but you can switch to a BT mic at the OS level (as with any app)

Re: Apple Music Sing

#215

Post by munificent »

colmmacc wrote: post #46
nkozyra wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of file formats support this, but they're generally for DAWs and not for a final mix. In order to support volume the file would have to be packed with each individual track. Almost assuredly this is just ML-assisted frequency separation.

AAC is already interleaved multi-channel. Two-channel L/R is obviously very common for music, but spatial audio and Dolby Atmos comes with more channels (up to 128, which can be arranged and binned into "beds"). 5.1 (6 channels) and 7.1 (8 channels) are also common for video. Having dedicated/isolated vocal tracks as a channel very trivial in the format. I'd expect this is how it's done, and not ML, because Apple hav…

It makes a lot of sense for an audio file format to support multiple tracks when each track is intended to target a different output device (left and right speakers, etc.)

It makes less sense when the intent is to mix those tracks together and send them to a single output device. Producers and audio engineers want full control over that mixing process because it's almost never just a simple sum. They are doing audio compression (sometimes multi-band), dynamic EQ, saturation, limiting, etc. They wouldn't want to give that up, because it's an essential part of making a good sounding recording.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#216

Post by gardenhedge »

rsynnott wrote: post #62
closetkantian wrote: post #41

This is so pointless that it made me start questioning reality and wondering if it was April Fool's Day.

... I mean, karaoke's pretty popular. This might actually make me switch to Apple Music.

Yeah.. I don't have loyalty to who streams me music so which app offers the most extras I will just get that one

Re: Apple Music Sing

#217

Post by danjc »

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…

Maybe the word “karaoke” sounds too old school for the target demographic.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#218

Post by mikestew »

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.

As an exercise for the reader: see if you can count the barriers-to-entry for the average person in this suggestion, and then contrast and compare to Apple's offering.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#219

Post by MBCook »

iicc wrote: post #40
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…

>Can anyone make out if songs like this are specially mastered with separate vocal channels ... or if Apple is applying ML to do voice isolation "Coupled with an ever-expanding catalog that features tens of millions of the world’s most singable songs" "The vocal slider adjusts vocal volume, but does not fully remove vocals " Based on the quantity and results it's ML like Spleeter ( https://research.deezer.com/project…

Oh good catch on that last bit. I missed it when reading through.

Re: Apple Music Sing

#220

Post by danjc »

Discovered moises.ai recently which uses ML to separate songs into separate tracks for vocal, bass, drums, guitar.

I was skeptical but it works surprisingly well.

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