Rack VS demucs

VCV Rack - Modular Synth

> It’s haven’t bought any Modular’s yet but I’m really looking forward to getting into other on the new year.

http://cardinal.kx.studio

https://vcvrack.com/

The former is libre and gratis, runs as a standalone or plugin and in the browser!! and is based on the latter.

Ther former has a libre and gratis standalone version, the plugin version is non-gratis.

A music synthesizer. It's a pathway to learning electronics, music, and the nature of sound. There are cheap kits, cheap synths, lots of kinds of synths, and there are much more complicated and expensive systems you can grow into. You can get software synths also, VCV Rack is a free though complex one:

https://vcvrack.com/

However I'd recommend an inexpensive hardware one with real knobs you can turn, like one of the Korg Volca series:

https://www.korg-volca.com/en/

Recording the sounds can lead into exploring all the concepts and gear involved in recording and mixing music. It's not mutually exclusive with doing other things also, you can play with both synths and computers and being involved with something artistic can add dimensions to and an escape from the nature of classwork/work.

Some other suggestions: gardening, high voltage electronics (with lots of supervision), electronics, photography, movie making, ham radio (gnu radio), show lighting systems (there's more than disco lights, robotics is involved), robotics, acoustic instruments (guitar, piano, flute, drums), sensors (you don't necessarily have to know electronics, get a data logger with built in sensors), weather monitoring/forecasting, hydraulic systems (with supervision), wood working, metal working, 3D printing, bird watching, painting, minibikes/small engines.

What really opened my eyes was the Nord Micromodular; it taught me what I just described. It showed me how limited other synths were - but that limitation was a trade-off because it's much faster to make something on a fixed-structure synth than on a modular, in most cases. Nowadays, you can use https://vcvrack.com/ instead of a small limited box that needs Windows 98 to run the editor on.

Also I would suggest the paid version of VCV rack which works as a VST too ( the free version is just stand alone ) Expecially when experimenting with modular ( believe me, it can save you a fortune whilst you learn what different modules do ) I would also recommend Omri Cohens Youtube channel for learning this too.

I've had the best results from Facebook's DEMUCs. It's not too difficult to install, and I like the sound quality of their mdx_extra model. This is the command line I use (this will use the 2 stem version -- vocals, and everything else)

facebookresearch/demucs: Stem seperation

For those interested, Facebook's Demucs page (https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs) gives performance comparison for several models including open-unmix.

See also: https://www.stemroller.com This runs as a local app on Windows and Mac.

Demucs [1], one of the leading/SOTA systems, has an experimental 6-source model, `htdemucs_6s`, which adds piano and guitar:

>We are also releasing an experimental 6 sources model, that adds a guitar and piano source. Quick testing seems to show okay quality for guitar, but a lot of bleeding and artifacts for the piano source.

I also believe Audioshake [2] (a company in the space) is doing guitar separation as well.

1: https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs

I don't know which one /u/DarkMemoria used exactly but I use demucs. If you go to the Colab section you can run it by putting the audio files you want to separate into Google Drive.

Demucs v4 is the best open source currently, that's also what the snippet from the video sounds like uses

already exist, for example I use demucs to separate songs into 6 tracks, and then I mute what i need to be silenced in any daw.

I regularly use demucs (https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs). It might be overwhelming when you are not used to work with the terminal, but it's as good as all the wrapper sites that ask for payment. Also, there are probably GUI projects that makes it even easier.

There's also the open source software https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs which I assume is what many of the free websites are using behind the scenes. There's a demo site here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/demucs but I haven't tested it for time limits/upload limits etc.

I used demucs to try and separate the vocals from the instrumental with fairly decent results. When playing the instrumental you can still vaguely hear some remnants of the vocals and I worry when it's played over a real sound system at the wedding it will be very obvious.