de-constructing cd tracks

  • Thread starter Thread starter sk910239
  • Start date Start date
S

sk910239

New member
This may question may have a very easy answer or no answer at all, unforunately I'm pretty ignorant on the subject and was wandering if anyone could help?
what I want to know is, is there a way of taking a cd track and somehow dividing it up into separate 'instrument' tracks. ie can you isolate drums, bass, vocals etc?

cheers
Mick
 
Sorry my friend but there's no way. Once everything is mixed to two tracks there's no going back. There's a way to remove information that's panned to the center, such as vocals, but it takes about everything that's there like bass. Very unsatisfying.
 
ok, how about any way of defining when different parts of a track begin/end from the audio data on a cd? I am not looking for the pure sound of each instrument, I am more interested in using some software or hardware that will recognise when these different parts of a track appear. Someone mentioned filters to me, but I'm even in the dark as to what these are!
 
you can rip the song, and write a new CD with track markers wherever you like... is that what you mean?? What exactly are you trying to do, here....?
xoxoox
 
Sorry, I'm making myself very unclear. I was planning on developing a little application that would produce a visual representation of an audio cd track. So you would stick a cd into your cd-rom drive and on your monitor and a display would give a user-friendly read-out of that track showing where certain parts of a track start/finish. So initially, in order to do this I need to find out how I can 'recognise' these different parts of a track, or even if it is possible. Being a complete novice to all this doesn't help but I was thinking along the lines of the indicators of a graphic equaliser, these must be set to pick up seperate freqencies or something so how is this done?

Mick
 
by 'parts' I was meaning things like intro, outro, vocal sections, drum breaks, solos, maybe even things like basslines. I was aiming this more at dance tracks if that is any help.
 
Pretty ambitious, I have to admit, but I don't think that is possible. For the longest time I'd wanted to invent something similar. :)

Isaiah
 
Well, start with making software that can figure out if somebody is singing or not, and then you might be halfway there... :)
Don't ask me how to do that though!
 
You could do a Fast Fourior Transform (if you're a programmer, this might be more up your alley) to analyse the frequencies present in the sound.. and then you could make guesses based on what frequencies are present, and point where there are major frequency shifts in a song.

There are two downsides to trying to do this:

1) All songs are different.. they won't all have the same type of frequency shifts -- so you can't always use the same ruleset to figure out what part of a song is what.

2) Most modern albums are mastered to shit.. that means that drastic shifts in frequencies are pretty much removed at the studio, and there are virtually no volume shifts in most modern recordings.

If you do decide to take this on, you've set yourself up with one heck of a project!
 
Back
Top