Demucs Music Source Separation [not a deal, but FREE]

[pseudopop]

I came across a program called Demucs that can process a song and save the instruments on it as separate files. Apparently it has been around for some time but this is the first time I've heard about it.

At the moment it seems to be able to split the song into four tracks: vocals, bass, drums and other (which in my case has been guitars). So far I have tested it with only a couple of rock songs (with vocals, two guitars, bass and drums), but I'm telling you folks: this program has no business being as ridiculously good as it is. Yes, there is some smearing and every once in a while the instruments bleed over to other tracks, but overall the instrument separation is really, really good.

I have only tried it with default settings and I am not exaggerating when I say that this has already revolutionized my transcribing process. It's like getting access to the separate stems of a song and it feels amazing to hear the bass of a song so clearly for the first time in your life.

I have also tried Stagecraft Simple Stems but this is in a completely different league.

Demucs is available as Python package on PyPi (installed with pip) but there is also a GUI for Windows and Mac. I haven't tried the GUI but if you're at all familiar with Python installing and using this is easy-peasy.

Installation instructions and resources:
https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs

GUI:
https://github.com/CarlGao4/Demucs-Gui

If you need/want to transcribe songs I wholeheartedly recommend you give Demucs a try!

[Glenn Stanton]

very very slow (on my laptop) but the extraction of the bass, drums, and vocals was impressive. it created an "others.wav" which was a combination of organ, rhythm guitar and lead guitar tracks (a 7 tracks total song - took about 20 minutes) - loads of reverb (which was preserved with each track!) the drums had both the drums and the congas. there are a couple of songs i wanted to remix for a bit but lost the source tracks or are live stereo recordings of a 4-piece band so it will be interesting to see how that works for enabling the remixes. but the quality is very high, and for a source mp3 - quality was really clean. the fact it had the reverb intact with just the instrument was shocking.

very cool program.

[daveiv]

Wait for a few months to see this stuck in a $50 plugin.

Just like how Stagecraft Simple Stems used Deezer's free and open source software Spleeter.