Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469840
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I S U M M E R 2 0 2 2 71 Close-up of the Vocal stem at the beginning of Led Zeppelin's "Good Times Bad Times." splits—without worrying about music licensing issues. Since then, I am often sent clips during rough cut edits for shows I mix to do "audio voodoo" on so that Legal doesn't have to worry about clearance problems. Even though I've been using the technology for years, I am still awestruck by it; probably because I've been studying audio for nearly three decades and have a vast appreciation for how complex of a process it must be. With that, I wanted to explore a couple source separation applications to hear the different results. The irony being that I can't post examples because of copyright issues—one of the contributing reasons for using the software in the first place… Software Used There are a number of software options available out there, from professional standalone applications to online drag- and-drops. While I reached out to additional vendors, the following were examined for this article: iZotope's RX8 Music Rebalance, RipX by Hit 'n' Mix, and Steinberg's SpectraLayers 8. These either didn't require credit card info to trial, or the vendor responded to my inquiry in time for the article. Though not examined here, some other options include Audionamix's XTRAX STEMS, AudioSourceRE DeMIX Pro, and AudioShake's Indie. One important note: I used the basic default settings provided. As one would expect, each software can be deeply altered and each also has many other impressive feature sets. Commercially Released Songs If you're working on a project that is using a commercially released song and are looking for a little extra flexibility relative to, say, vocals fighting with dialogue or voice over, you might find some helpful results with some of these applications. To compare results, I ran two songs through the software. The first was Led Zeppelin's "Good Times Bad Times" because it's straight- up classic rock with vocals, guitars, bass, and some of the coolest drumming. For this tune, each software provided stems called Bass, Drums, and Vocals, along with "Other"—this is where the guitars went. The first noticeable difference was in the vocal, which comes in on a pickup with the lyrics, "In the." Interestingly, these two words start on both the Other and Drum tracks in RX and SpectraLayers before segueing to the Vocal stem. In RipX, they start on the Vocal stem without bleed into the Other stem. Another noticeable difference was the bridge section after the first chorus RX's Music Rebalance default setting