Tags:

Tag: music

  1. Command Line Music Mixer

    The idea here is to have a system where you start off with some raw tracks in flac format or something.

    Then, edits to the tracks are described using a textual description language. One can then read the edits, and use them to perform the required changes until you end up with the end result. One edit can base itself off the output of another, so you end up with a dependency tree.

    The advantage here is that once everyone has the raw tracks, every change to it is super light and easy to share, merge, etc. That way people can work on a track together, collaborating, and they don't have to send a bunch of audio files back and forth.

    I have an example on my laptop I haven't copied anywhere else, and it uses redo and sox to compute the end results.

    This works quite well, since if I change one property it only performs the changes on the tracks that depended on it, the rest it can use from last time.

    Now, editing a directory full of files is how I like to work, but a graphical tool could easily be written that just sat on top and made the editing more fancy, still doing directories and stuff in the backend for easy sharing.

  2. De-Mix

    This is an idea to take a mixed music track, and seperate it out into tracks again. I have no idea how effective it may be until I actually try it.

    So, the gist is that we build a spectrogram out of it, using Fourier Transforms, Wavelet Transforms, or maybe some sort of raw Resonator structure. Then, we pass over the spectrogram looking for changes across the spectrum that occur within a relatively short time window. We assume that these are all likely harmonics from the same instrument hitting a note, and extract them.

    Then we end up with a bunch of small snippets consisting of, often, a single note. The hope, though, is that it will be a single complete note from a single instrument, with nothing else.

    Then, we can run a program that looks for similarities between the samples and groups and splices them such that we end up with a complete track that's all the same instrument. Hopefully.

    That's basically it. It'd likely take a really long time to run, but perhaps it could work. Perhaps.

    It's more likely that this technique will work on acoustic music best, since they will have timing imperfections that will be easier to pick up on, since it's unlikely that the snare is truly exactly the same timing as the bass.

    Electronic music, though, can have the snare and the bass begin at exactly the same time. Who knows, maybe people are better than I think and it's always garbage.