Datameister

In all seriousness, I worried about that before I started playing with this technology! I was (and still am) strongly opposed to making generative AI publicly available, and I don't trust its outputs. Until I gave MVSep a shot, I didn't understand that it's just using AI to decide which parts of the audio signal to pull out and which parts to leave behind. It's not really generating anything new.

Interesting! The individual models continue to blow me away. They can extract details I can't hear in the full mix, even once I know they're there. Really extraordinary.

I don't take intentional breaks, but I go through dry spells with any given composer. And I tell you what...I never enjoy JW's music more than when I'm listening to it for the first time in a while. Overall, my pure undistracted listening time has definitely decreased over the years. I always feel like I want to do more of that, but my limited free time tends to fill up with other projects, time with friends/family, and turn-my-brain-off leisure. And as much as I've stayed away from the web's more attention-span-shattering diversions, I've still lost some focus, sadly.

100%. And the quotes in Reminiscence Therapy, for that matter.

Keep in mind that the drums multi-stem option can extract some of those elements. It's geared more toward drum sets, but I've still been able to get useable results for orchestral stuff at times.

"Lovely ringing brilliance" is a wonderful description of the trumpet sound I like, yeah. You can find it in a lot of JW's older LA recordings (E.T., Jurassic Park, etc.) but not so much in the last 20 years. Yep, great example of what I'm talking about with octaves. It also illustrates how writing style can be a factor—JW would have been way less likely to write that passage in the 80s or 90s.

The worst moments are when the trumpets have (non-staccato) octave doublings. I'm not super fond of that sound even in my favorite recordings, but it's way worse in recordings like KOTCS.

I'm dazzled by all JW's London recordings from around the new millennium. ROTS suffers somewhat from the percussion being recorded separately with close mics, but otherwise it still sounds spectacular. A dozen years later, Galaxy's Edge gave us another taste. Glorious. For TLJ, I think the rough edges are somewhat smoothed by reverb; they went with a wetter sound for that one. But I still hear that unflattering sound in the trumpets—just not as much as in a score like KOTCS.

Mainly the trumpets, yeah. I mean, "hate" is a strong word; for me, it's more that they pale in comparison to the trumpets in TOD and especially Raiders, and there are a few passages where they become a bit annoying. But all of JW's Sony recordings since that time period have sounded that way, to some degree. I can't shake the suspicion that something changed with the acoustics of that stage. Maybe it's that, plus different gear, plus different mic setups, plus aging personnel, plus changes in JW's writing style, plus...? I dunno.

I'm glad to hear it!

It's not all OT. I was there yesterday and heard some TROS, for example. And like I said, there are some arrangements that I don't recognize. The most prominent example was the rendition of the Force theme I heard in the entrance archway, but there were others too.

I do think that the sheer volume of Star Wars stuff has contributed to that feeling. But also, it's been 6 years since the last "episode" movie, and it definitely feels more like 2 years to me...

There are some arrangements in the land that I don't recognize. Interesting!

I know you're being a little facetious, but in all seriousness, you're hinting at one way stem separation is making the process more fun for me. Before, yes, I would just end up listening to the same few seconds over and over and over again, trying to simultaneously dissect the instrumentation and pick out the individual pitches. One unfortunate result is that I would tend to get a little tired of the piece, or at least so familiar with every auditory nuance that it lost some of its emotional impact. Now, with stem separation, I'm probably not cutting down the total number of times I have to listen to each passage...but some of those times I'm listening just to the trumpets, or just to the harp, or just to the cellos, or whatever. I only have to listen to the final mix a few times to make sure I'm not being led astray by imperfections in the stem separation. As a result, I don't get so tired of the piece.

Nah, there's no fun in that!