Rebalancing/splitting fully mixed songs

Ask questions and get answers about how to make music in any particular way. Hardware or songwriting or whatever.
Post Reply
User avatar
jast
Ice Cream Man
Posts: 1325
Joined: Tue Jul 29, 2008 7:03 pm
Instruments: Vocals, guitar
Recording Method: Cubase, Steinberg UR44
Submitting as: Jan Krueger
Pronouns: .
Location: near Aachen, Germany
Contact:

Rebalancing/splitting fully mixed songs

Post by jast »

Can't believe anyone posted this yet... in these modern days, there are tools to split/remove e.g. vocals from a finished mix that don't sound completely terrible. You get 4-5 separate tracks out of them (think bass/drums/vocals/misc), and/or a set of faders to re-balance these parts of the audio.

One of these is Deezer's Spleeter - open source! For a convenient free web interface that doesn't even require registration, how about this one: https://splitter.ai/ - and here's an example, using the MP3 submission of my last SF winner track and removing the vocals from it:
oolnovox-spleeter.mp3
(2.94 MiB) Downloaded 47 times
Another is iZotope's RX 8. In RX 7 this feature already existed but I thought Spleeter sounded a little better. RX 8 manages to outperform both in my opinion. The downside, of course, is that it's not free. Here's an example using the same source file:
oolnovox-rx8.mp3
(3.74 MiB) Downloaded 45 times
PS. using an MP3 file as the source exposes some of the psychoacoustic destruction of the MP3 codec, in addition to any processing artifacts. I didn't have an uncompressed version of the original mix handy, though. Sorry.
User avatar
Lunkhead
You're No Good
Posts: 8104
Joined: Sat Sep 25, 2004 12:14 pm
Instruments: many
Recording Method: cubase/mac/tascam4x4
Submitting as: Berkeley Social Scene, Merisan, Tiny Robots
Pronouns: he/him
Location: Berkeley, CA
Contact:

Re: Rebalancing/splitting fully mixed songs

Post by Lunkhead »

Wow, that's pretty cool. I recently used RX 7 to remove the bleed of drum stick clicks from a bass guitar track. (The bass was recorded through a mic'd amp, not direct.) It worked surprisingly well! This kind of stuff is up there with polyphonic autotune in being very mind blowing.
User avatar
ujnhunter
Ice Cream Man
Posts: 1804
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 1:09 pm
Instruments: Bass, Keyboards, Crummy Guitar & Animal Noises (especially Donkeys)
Recording Method: Reaper 5.9x, Tascam FireOne/Behringer UMC202HD/Avid Eleven Rack/Line 6 UX2, Win 7 PC / Win 10 Laptop
Submitting as: Cock, Chth*.*, D.A.H. (Der Alter Hahn)
Pronouns: His Infernal Majesty
Location: CT, USA
Contact:

Re: Rebalancing/splitting fully mixed songs

Post by ujnhunter »

If you wanted a local copy of Spleeter that doesn't require a bunch of crazy Python install stuff (Windows 10 only though)... https://makenweb.com/#spleetergui I have used this in the past to try and split some instrument files to use for transcribing purposes... much easier than trying to transcribe bass from a full mix for me. I haven't tried RX7/8 yet...
-Ujn Hunter
Photovoltaik - Free 6 Track EP - Song Fight! Liner Notes
Billy's Little Trip wrote:I must have this....in my mouth.....now.
Post Reply