How to separate instrument tracks from a song into vocals, drums, bass, and other.

NOTE: For research purposes only. Use at your own risk.

I study/read/work with soundtracks. That’s the best way I can focus. I cannot concentrate listening to music that has vocals. I’ve been wondering what is like to listen to other music I like without the vocals.

I wonder what Daft Punk sounds without vocals. I know. Most songs by Daft Punk are already instrumental.

I found this repo with a list of ML projects. See here

One of them is a project called demucs, used to separate tracks from songs. More about the project here

Installing demucs

Install using this:

pip install demucs

The output shows that a lot of dependencies need to be installed:

  • demucs
  • diffq>=0.2.1
  • dora-search
  • einops
  • julius>=0.2.3
  • lameenc>=1.2
  • openunmix
  • torch>=1.8.1 (this was the largest with approx 900MB)
  • torchaudio>=0.8
  • tqdm
  • Cython
  • numpy
  • nvidia-cudnn-cu11==8.5.0.96 (also a big one 500MB)
  • nvidia-cublas-cu11==11.10.3.66 (300MB)
  • nvidia-cuda-nvrtc-cu11==11.7.99
  • nvidia-cuda-runtime-cu11==11.7.99
  • retrying
  • treetable
  • omegaconf
  • submitit
  • antlr4-python3-runtime==4.9.*
  • cloudpickle>=1.2.1

More output:

Successfully built demucs julius dora-search antlr4-python3-runtime treetable
Installing collected packages: lameenc, antlr4-python3-runtime, treetable, tqdm, retrying, omegaconf, nvidia-cuda-runtime-cu11, nvidia-cuda-nvrtc-cu11, nvidia-cublas-cu11, numpy, einops, Cython, cloudpickle, submitit, nvidia-cudnn-cu11, torch, torchaudio, julius, dora-search, diffq, openunmix, demucs
Successfully installed Cython-0.29.33 antlr4-python3-runtime-4.9.3 cloudpickle-2.2.1 demucs-4.0.0 diffq-0.2.3 dora-search-0.1.11 einops-0.6.0 julius-0.2.7 lameenc-1.4.2 numpy-1.24.2 nvidia-cublas-cu11-11.10.3.66 nvidia-cuda-nvrtc-cu11-11.7.99 nvidia-cuda-runtime-cu11-11.7.99 nvidia-cudnn-cu11-8.5.0.96 omegaconf-2.3.0 openunmix-1.2.1 retrying-1.3.4 submitit-1.4.5 torch-1.13.1 torchaudio-0.13.1 tqdm-4.64.1 treetable-0.2.5

Running demucs

Run with this:

demucs path-to-file

Output running the program

Important: the default model was recently changed to `htdemucs` the latest Hybrid Transformer Demucs model. In some cases, this model can actually perform worse than previous models. To get back the old default model use `-n mdx_extra_q`.
Downloading: "https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/demucs/hybrid_transformer/955717e8-8726e21a.th" to /home/tom/.cache/torch/hub/checkpoints/955717e8-8726e21a.th
80.2M/80.2M
Selected model is a bag of 1 models. You will see that many progress bars per track.
Separated tracks will be stored in /home/tom/Music/separated/htdemucs
<