Stem separation in Sonar?

[Jeremy Oakes]

On 11/27/2023 at 11:32 PM, Annabelle said:

I wonder if Hit N Mix RipX DAW could work within Sonar 8.5 for stem separation.

It works as a dll in CbB for sure. I can try if in Splat for you,. 

If your installation of 8.5 is 64bit then it “should”work……..

J

[msmcleod]

The only consideration is that Sonar 8.5 doesn't support VST3, only VST2.  So if RipX is VST3 only, then it's not going to work with Sonar 8.5.

[John Vere]

An update on the separation tool in Next. Further reading of the manual reveals the mystery of the 44.1 files that come back from the server playing in a 48 project.  

As we all know any audio dropped into Cakewalk gets converted to the project sample rate. 
It seems Next doesn’t work like this, it simply converts it in real time as you play it. The results will be dependent on your systems abilities to accomplish this in real time with out glitches etc. 

So best to take the stems and either convert them or better yet drop them into Cakewalk. They might sound better. 
Too bad I found out after I made the video. I’ll add it to the comments but nobody reads those anyway 

Then in my case the original wave files are 44.1 anyhow so I need to change my default for new project and my interfaces settings to 44.1 before I import the song. 

Edited November 30, 2023 by John Vere

[Jeremy Oakes]

On 11/30/2023 at 9:27 AM, msmcleod said:

The only consideration is that Sonar 8.5 doesn't support VST3, only VST2.  So if RipX is VST3 only, then it's not going to work with Sonar 8.5.

@msmcleod  I checked and RipX (or its vst name RipLink) is vst3 only. So I guess no, it won't work with 8.5

J

[Chris Watkins]

So, I used Cakewalk in DOS.. I find it irritating Sonar doesn't do VST3, but if you've ever been a plug developer, It's what made stienberg famous.. It's also in a sense what helped protools sell, cause everybody traded those plugins..   Now, on to the separation,  I actually put it in awhile back for a feature, so you can blame me if you want..  It's so much faster then running demucs, and when you put them back together, you see FAR less difference if you mess with the tracks.

Now, this being said, as I've had the capability for a few years, one can absolutely use youtube as the legal guard.

Not to advertise but, on https://www.youtube.com/@oxyosbourne

I've been mostly just pitch increasing the vocals... HOWEVER,

There are few ways to get it to not see the copyright violation, that being said, one should consider, it's using the same type of sine-wave-plotting magic to pick out a copywrite violation from the stereo mix..

Also, if you use a microphone or say play the vinyl version sometimes it doesn't get it.

And also, the RipX daw just uses demucs underneath the hood, so if you can yt-dlp a something, ffmpeg it to wav and then run demucs you have that.

BUT, WAIT!!

Bandlab ponied up to do it for people for FREE.

 

Here's the thing, the learning part, hearing stairway with no guitar, hearing words from epic rock songs cause you can hear vocal messups when it solo's the stuff, you've never hear, It's an adventure for any audio-olo-something gist..  Pick your favorite song folk, listening to randy rhoads guitar only on a  ozzy song.

So, yee-haw!

[John Vere]

Using the beta of Next

I spent a bunch of time working in 44.1 on a test computer and did about 30 of my old songs from the masters. These are all from the 8 track days and so I don’t have the multi track recording anymore.  
 

Most worth while was lifting the excellent drum tracks  played by an amazing drummer. 
I already took one song and used drum replacer etc. very cool to rebuild the old songs like this. 

So with very little fuss I now have a midi bass and drum backing track for my own song. 
Tools used :

Next for stems 

Cakewalk to: 

Drag drums to timeline for  tempo map 

Drum replacer and ARA to convert audio to midi Kick snare and random fills

Bass audio to midi via ARA. 
Quantize to 1/16 th 

Was easy to add missing drum parts using both controller and drawing missing Tom’s and cymbals.  
 

90%! Cloned and sounds better than the 8 track cassette recorder. 

Edited February 23 by John Vere

[Teegarden]

9 hours ago, Chris Watkins said:

Not to advertise but, on https://www.youtube.com/@oxyosbourne

I got curious after your cryptic post so checked your channel and tried my best to make sense of it.  That was a trip in itself?... there's a quote about Spock having used too much LSD in the sixties. It never occurred to you that the reference may have been to you?

 

Back on topic:
We had a good discussion about this a year ago. It contains references and and more background info: best-plugin-for-extracting-stems
 

Here are some recent reviews and comparisons between the different options: 

• 5-best-stem-separation-software (Musicradar)
• best-stem-separation-tools (Musictech)
• best-stem-separation-software (EDMsauce)

They came up with a free online tool I didn't know before as one of the best options: Gaudio Studio  which seems to be good and straight forward.

 

 

[Chris Watkins]

Yes, after 4+ decades of computing, texting/posting, it happens & yes, I'm LDS so I did LSD, just like spock.  But, norebang, that I've tried with tts, demucs, etc.

I can get the language translation with https://huggingface.co/spaces/coqui/xtts, but it doesn't do tempo.  Now, that and it's probably a little like bandlabs AI starter,but I used waves, demucs will build a song, match tempo's so I trained it on carpenters, wacko results, and yet a wack different kind of building block tends to set pace sometimes to trending.

So, the norebang looks interesting, thanks hadn't seen that one yet.. 

Also, split stems doesn't seem to work in Cubase Next, but I'd perfer it to work in wine and the GUI library's are making that a frustration..

Case anybody's on that project, both new products have issues with wine and the gui, edge web-something-crap from ms..

cause wine hasn't got to doing ms's latest whatever for doing cross-platform-apps.

 

[Chris Watkins]

Also, it was probably driver error, I didn't save the project first and that's probably why I didn't get the split option.

Which reminds me, since alot of folk are going to use .webm, using a url would be great, like gaudio, in fact, it's probably alot but to combine the video, which I just use bandlan to put my picture up on the changed audio, but, youtoube hit's seem to be far highwith the video and copywrite wize, artist gets credit, even if you butcher ti, but it does give a new look to something old.. aka, video killed the radio star and then the internet killed multimedia, also I of course in the past demucs and destroyed the first mtv video ever.

 

[Chris Watkins]

Ah, norebang doesn't change the original audio, well that's just silly.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/coqui/xtts does, but again, not in time.. wonder if there's a librariable gateway to the two..

 

[AB99]

I have never tried stem separation.  I have a song from some years ago that is mixed and I no longer have the individual tracks.  It is a fairly dense mix with piano in it.

I would like to redo the piano as it was not recorded very well.  Can I pull it out with one of these stem tools?  Thank you!

[John Vere]

@Alan Bachman 

Yes and no. 
The Bandlab separation tool only gives you 4 tracks. Bass, Vocals, Drums and then Other. 
The other track is just that, everything but the first 3 tracks. 
But I noticed on a web page for another separation app that it shows a piano track as well. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the screen shots in my video. 

[mettelus]

On 12/20/2023 at 12:43 PM, Alan Bachman said:

I would like to redo the piano as it was not recorded very well.  Can I pull it out with one of these stem tools?  Thank you!

This is highly dependent on the original track and how it was mixed. Frequency overlaps between instruments can cause phasing issues (i.e., parts of stems end up in other stems), so if you (slightly) modify those and remix they can become transparent. However, if you remove a track entirely, that phasing will persist, and may not be usable even with more surgery. When you say "fairly dense," that is where you may find the limitations of un-mixing stems in short order.

Almost every plugin that does this (and has additional repair tools) has a fully functional demo available (RX Standard/Advanced or SpectraLayers Pro), so if this is a one-off situation, you could demo one of those and see how it works for you with that specific track, and at least get that work done with the demo alone.

Edited February 23 by mettelus

[AB99]

6 hours ago, mettelus said:

This is highly dependent on the original track and how it was mixed. Frequency overlaps between instruments can cause phasing issues (i.e., parts of stems end up in other stems), so if you (slightly) modify those and remix they can become transparent. However, if you remove a track entirely, that phasing will persist, and may not be usable even with more surgery. When you say "fairly dense," that is where you may find the limitations of un-mixing stems in short order.

Almost every plugin that does this (and has additional repair tools) has a fully functional demo available (RX Standard/Advanced or SpectraLayers Pro), so if this is a one-off situation, you could demo one of those and see how it works for you with that specific track, and at least get the that work done with the demo alone.

Thank you. This is what I was concerned about.  The piano is just one of many instruments.  So, I suppose it is worth a try!

[Annabelle]

I bet stem separation is like microsurgery for audio. Just like Data Recovery is like microsurgery on a hard drive. In other words, it's a very delicate process!

[sjoens]

My small stem separation tools:

no AI required 

[John Vere]

Was interesting to re read and see from my perspective how much changed since November. You see me speculating about using this tool to create backing tracks which is exactly what I’ve done for about 6 songs now. 
 

Also the more you dig the more it seems they all use the same code made by Deezer. 
And seems that’s exactly what they have done in Cakewalk Next.
When you choose the track and then “Separate into Stems” it asks for permission to upload to the server. I was thinking it was Bandlabs server but now I see it’s Deezer. So they just added the free code it seems is available to all developers. 

So far converting the bass into midi has been the biggest success. It’s pretty cool to use the original bass line. They do things I would not have thought about. Then looking under the microscope of midi notes and timing you can now see what you were hearing and couldn’t quite copy. 
 

Drums I have only managed to use  the original audio on 2 songs. The others it sucked due to the phasing.
I managed to extract the kick with drum replacer from 3 and the snare from 1 . 
But what is cool is to replace the drums and keyboard/ horns/ steel drums while playing along with the original tracks.
 

This results in a more accurate reproduction and if you put in the time, it’s almost possible to achieve a very close version of those parts in the tracks. A whole new approach to midi editing. 

So it would save a little more time if you could extract down a little deeper on the “Other” track

Edited February 23 by John Vere

[John Vere]

1 hour ago, sjoens said:

My small stem separation tools:

no AI required 

Don’t remind me. I have 8 fruit trees that will need stem separation soon.