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 separate tracks with level info?
"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/projects/spleeter.html).
> Do any audio file formats support separate tracks with level info?
I don't know what file format audio engineering software uses to store all the track info but my guess is that it's akin to a zip file containing a flac for each track.
I've never had this produce good results. It removes major parts of the music, while also not fully removing the vocals.
I would actually take that and record out from that to another tape, so I could have 'instrumental' versions of the songs.
And, no - it doesn't work very well at all; it sounds like a poor 64kbps MP3 with bizarre artifacts and; yes - many missing instruments.
Almost assuredly this is just ML-assisted frequency separation.
It absolutely could be done, I just think that Apple would want very good coverage and studios would be very slow to provide this format.
It's already become pretty common for studios and labels to make stems available (stems are full multi-track files that can be used with a DAW) to industry insiders and even the public sometimes. There's a community of remixers, samplers, even a small cottage industry of YouTubers who work with these regularly. It wouldn't take them more than a few minutes per track to annotate which channel is vocals.
Do you stop at instruments and vocals or are we talking 100+ tracks? It strikes me as nontrivial work for very limited purpose. Apple can turn your vocals down so now your exports have to include extra tracks? I don't think that's a good enough sell. The labels do care about this use case.
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.
Presumably if they have Don’t Stop Believing and a separate karaoke karaoke today, they could basically cross fade between them for the adjustment of original singer vocals. And it would work better than trying to remove vocals after the fact.
But that would require both versions, synchronizing them, and KNOWING which two tracks went together.
Is that easier or harder than getting the labels to just give you a special version with an extra channel for vocals?
Hopefully someone digs in and finds out once this is released.
Depends on the label and the artist. Could be easier, could be much harder. Sometimes multi-stems just don't exist anymore; were lost, have additional licensing issues; labels are a nightmare to deal with.
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.