Spleeter is an Open Source “Source Separation Engine” released by streaming platform Deezer. It isn’t a plug-in, an application or even a product in the commercial sense, it is intended to help the research community in Music Information Retrieval access the power of a state-of-the-art source separation algorithms. It comes in the form of a Python Library based on Tensorflow, with pre-trained models for 2, 4 and 5 stems separation.
What Can Spleeter Do?
If you listen to the Bowie example below you’ll hear how Spleeter can unmix music. This is early days for this kind of technology and, just like the commercial products available, when used to completely isolate or exclude elements of a mix the artefacts produced seriously limit the usefulness of these tools but the fact that this can be done at all is seriously impressive even in 2019.
How To Try Spleeter
Although Spleeter is freely available to all, it isn’t for the casual user, it is purely command-line driven and “under the hood” knowledge of computers and code is assumed, it is a research tool after all. Having access to the code is interesting as, unlike the commercial products out there which offer similar functionality, having direct access tot he engine means that, in the right hands, it can be tweaked to perform better on specific material.
How Can I Try Spleeter Without Installing It?
Not all of us are going to install something as user-unfriendly as this Command-Line engine, if you want to try it and lack the computer chops to get hands-on with the engine itself head over to melody.ml where you can upload a stereo mp3 and they will process and email you the stems, again all in mp3 format. We tried this and the results were impressive. Although there were lots and lots of artefacts and warbly modulations, when recombined they offered all the options of stem mixing. Just don’t try to drop the band out for an acapella verse, impressive as this tech is it isn’t quite there yet!
What Commercial Products Offer Unmixing?
iZotope offer Master Rebalance in Ozone and RX. The name iZotope have chosen and the way they have presented the controls are a clear indications tat they feel that while this technology is suitably advanced to offer genuinely useful production tools for adjusting the relative levels of the different elements in t a track, the results aren’t yet at the point where isolated elements can be presented on their own or out of their original context without the artefacts becoming too audible for professional use.
Audionamic Xtrax goes further in terms of separation, offering full stem extraction into drums, vocals and “music” by which we’re sure they mean pitched instruments, not just taking a swipe at drummers!
Zynaptiq offer Unmix Drums, a plug-in which can extract drums and percussion from a stereo mix.
With unmixing tech progressing at the speed it is, artefact free unmixing seems to be only a matter of time away. Interestingly developments like the recent launch of Mix The Music, a service which offers multitracks of commercially released music suggests that record companies should monetise their multitracks before technology catches up with them.