Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529890
36 W I N T E R 2 0 2 5 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Music Rebalancing Software Shootout b y D a v i d B o n d e l e v i t c h C A S M P S E For this article, I took a look at various tools for rebalancing music as film mixes may need the tracks rebalanced for any number of reasons, from pulling the vocals down or out to avoid dialogue to replacing the vocalist or cleaning up a mix that is in some way lacking. If a musical sequence is performed to a track that only exists in the released version, it is useful for rebalancing and fixing lip sync. One could also solo the vocals on a master and add a new arrangement to them. Shortly into my tests, I realized that these programs are much more difficult to use effectively than expected. I deliberately chose songs famous for being badly mixed, starting with The Beatles Hamburg "Bootlegs." Perhaps it is because they are mono and in such bad shape that none of the apps I tried on any of the songs gave back anything useful. All the apps have issues with aliasing and envelopes. In this case, the aliasing made it completely unusable. I had hoped that after splitting the tracks, I could do noise reduction and de-reverbing individually, but with the aliasing, that was impossible. Phase- coherency is an issue with all these apps, as far as I could tell. My second attempt was on a Nina Simone recording of "Mississippi Goddam," where she speaks off-mic at the beginning while accompanying herself on piano, then starts to sing the song. I had hoped to be able to clean up her speech so that you could hear her introduction better, as the song is a historical part of the Civil Rights movement. This also failed; I found it impossible to make her speaking voice useable. My third attempt was the Stan Kenton arrangement of "MacArthur Park." The whole mix was done live to two-track