Comment by lubujackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lubujackson | Hacker News Reader

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Seems like most music (from the 70s on at least) is recorded multi-track and the data is out there, just not accessible to anybody. If you ever watch Rick Beato videos, he takes classic songs and isolates vocal/drum/etc. tracks all the time, I'm not sure how he has access to them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW0NGgv1qnfzb1klL6Vw9...

But you probably don't need to bother with old recordings since there is SO MUCH music being produced via tracking software right now I feel like it should be possible to get a pretty big dataset - the difference being, of course, professional production that affects how all these things sound in the final mix.

Although... if you have enough songs with separated tracks, couldn't you just recombine tracks and adjust the settings to create a much, much broader base for training? Just a dozen songs could be shuffled around to give you a base of 10,000+ songs easily enough. That might lead to a somewhat brittle result but it would be a decent start.

Rick says in one of his videos that he and some of his buddies have got old copies of the original source (separated) tracks, and they kind of pass them around between each other.

I find that pretty amazing given the litigiousness of some in the music industry, but there we are.

Side note: I discovered Rick Beato a few months ago and I've watched heaps of his videos. It's really fascinating hearing old classics torn down to their constituent parts. Here's one of my favourites of his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynFNt4tgBJ0 (Boston - More than a feeling).

Rick Beato is excellent. Nahre Sol and Adam Neely also do great analyses of things. Adam in a more theory oriented way and Nahre in a more feeling and composition focussed way; "Funk as digested by a classical musician" for example looks at funk to try and find the key structures of the style which illuminates things I might not have noticed otherwise.

Also 8 bit music theory has very solid video essays on varying compositional concepts that are reflected using game music. I actually find his work most consistently satisfying. Neely and Beato are great but lower s/n ratio. Nahre not enough watches to say but thumbs up for her, too.

Don't forget JazzDuets's channel. His content seems to be most mature and uses actual playing a lot to tune your ear. I find him actually a bit too advanced for my level but I like a lot his very humble and friendly personal touch.

Isn't that litigiousness mainly around money? Another important currency in the music world is respect. E.g., look at how Chamillionaire talks about Weird Al: http://yankovic.org/blog/2006/09/13/high-praise-from-chamill...

Given that, I expect that a show titled "What Makes This Song Great" will do fine. Who doesn't love having somebody note the non-obviously good parts of their work. Especially if, as with Weird Al, proper royalties are paid.

The artists and performers are often quite reasonable. When you sign a major label deal, many sign away the rights to and control of their work in an effort to make a living and support their families. They need the money, also maybe a gold record.

Once they sign, the RIAA and label lawyers get to work, so the creator may not have any influence or own the masters.

Artists have a good chance of getting the point that authentic publicity is gonna garner authentic fans with authentic ticket stubs, but in the contract, on page 147 section 14a, under "Rights and Royalties" states ...

OMG yes. I watch very little YouTube, but reading these comments I thought "this Rick guy is probably that one I saw a couple months ago, his separated Boston tune was really amazing." And there it is.

Thanks for the Rick Beato mention. Just spent a couple hours watching some of his breakdowns. Fascinating stuff and reminded me how much I like this type of analysis.

I've personally collected thousands of multitracks, stems and remix kits.

Sources are e.g. multitracks that someone leaked (like original unmixed Madonna sessions), constructed MOGG files from various Rock Band games, stems prepared for remixers etc.

I'm wondering if you could even use this to separate unrelated pieces of audio? E.g. instrumental music and someone reading a book out loud. And if you could use this to generate useful training data.

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