Interesting free software from MIT

[Reverend Jim]

For any karaoke freaks out there, There is an experimental package available for free from MIT called spleeter. This is a simple (in terms of use) AI which is quite remarkable in its ability to separate an audio file into component sounds. In its simplest form it can take a song and split it into separate instrumental and vocal files. Great for those of us who want to see how we would sound in place of the original artist. If you already have python 3.x installed you can get the package by

pip install spleeter

although it is always a good idea to make sure pip is current by first doing

pip install --upgrade pip

As an example, if you have a file, Mad World.mp3 you can split it up by

spleeter separate -i "Mad Worls.mp3" -o audio_out -n filename

The first time you run it will be a tad slow as it must first download the training files into the folder pretrained_models. Subsequent runs are much faster. Output is in

.\audio_out\Mad World\accompaniment.wav
.\audio_out\Mad World\vocals.wav

I found that the easiest way to plug myself in was to run Audacity (free audio software), drop in the accompaniment and vocals as separate stereo tracks, then add a new stereo track. Plug in the headphones, hit record and sing along. Then you can mute or delete the original vocal track and voila.

Adding command line parameters allows you to separate out instrumental tracks as separate drum, piano, etc.

[rproffitt]

Say Jim? My buddy in BC, Canada wrote back with this. Any clues what's up or down?

That's amazing!

I wasn't able to install it though. I've got a linux machine here with Python 2 and Python 3 on it, but nada! Says the package isn't actually available. Might be a US only thing.

[Reverend Jim]

That's odd. I'm in Canada (Winnipeg) and I had no trouble. As for linux/Windows, the headers on the python components are linux style

#!/usr/bin/env python

They have a forum where you can post questions if there are problems. They are very responsive. Did he/she try to install it by

pip install spleeter

I just went for the simple install. Apparently, if you have an nvidia gpu there is a way to install/setup so that most of the work is done on the gpu. They claim it runs about 100 times faster that way.