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Multi track Music format

Saperate Track for every musical instrument and vocals
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Say, if we fix on 6 -track music file format. This allows for 1 vocal (mono) track and 5 musical instruments, all mono.

Audio player lets us choose selctively to switch off tracks that we don't want or reduce volume of those tracks.

Alternatively player adds spacial dimention (Phase, left right balance) to give synthesized stereo while playing.

VJW, Jan 30 2011

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       If you'll go to the effort of spelling some of the words correctly, perhaps we, your readers, might figure out what you're on about.
lurch, Jan 30 2011
  

       HB's spell check has not been working for me. But let me check.
VJW, Jan 30 2011
  

       Unless all music to date is re-recorded, this will only work for new music. If they recorded this in a program like Audacity and released the .aup file (if Audacity were the standard program), this is completely possible. You can certainly do this for your own recordings, but it will take up a lot of space compared to a .mp3.
TomP, Jan 30 2011
  

       How'bout using the 7.1 movie soundtrack format ?
FlyingToaster, Jan 30 2011
  

       [TomP]Agreed. It could be still worth it. I think recording studios lose a lot of valuable information when they record and store a single combined recoding of any music track. They should store with them a saperate recording of each sound source. Because a graphic equalizer, no matter how many channels it has, can never effectively filter out sounds selectively.
VJW, Jan 30 2011
  

       [FT]I believe 7.1 does not have true 7 tracks. I think it has only strereo track (two channels) and it "generates" other tracks from encoded information within main stereo tracks.
VJW, Jan 30 2011
  

       Many existing formats are able to have many tracks - even a .wav file can have up to 65536 tracks.   

       Personally, I would not like to //fix on 6 -track music file format//. It's a really outdated idea that you have to follow some standard format for digital recordings, now that it's basically just data. I would like 4-track recordings of barbershop quartets (I actually have some of those, from a barbershop practice disk), maybe more for orchestral recordings, possibly dozens of tracks for some synthesized music, but a good stereo recording would do for many solo performances.   

       I agree about the loss of information. I always find it a bit painful mixing down my own recordings and sessions to stereo.   

       Releasing the original tracks is a bit like releasing the source code for software; it takes control away from the creators, and increases others' power over the product. That has advantages and disadvantages. Radiohead might consider it; they're pretty cool about such things.
spidermother, Jan 30 2011
  

       // 65536 tracks//   

       Can you independently control these "tracks" ? I thought wave files were only in mono and stereo formats.
VJW, Jan 30 2011
  

       Yes, they are genuine, fully independent audio tracks, no strings attached. There are two bytes in the header section that indicate the number of tracks; 2 bytes = 16 bits = 65536 possibilities. It would have been silly to have arbitrarily limited the number of tracks to 2, and fortunately the designers seem to have realised that.
spidermother, Jan 30 2011
  

       The best recordings use a single matched stereo pair of microphones in a venue with a good acoustic.
pocmloc, Jan 30 2011
  

       It depends on what you mean by 'best'. In many situations, I agree with you. My favourite setup for recording small unamplified groups is a good M-S pair, in, as you say, a good venue. Most of the effort is in finding a good placement for the mics, and sometimes the musicians. A friend uses at least 3 mics - one centre, and a pair of separated hemispherical mics to capture some phase information. Others use a simple 90 degree coincident crossed pair, which I have also tried. Still others place 4 or more mics at varying distances from the performers, then create a mix to get the desired balance between direct and ambient sound. I'm not fond of that method, personally, but I would be hard pressed to say that any is better than the others. They do give subtly different results.   

       In many cases, though, a single stereo recording method doesn't make sense. This includes music that relies heavily on multitrack recording, digital effects applied to individual sounds, computer generated sounds, etc., and where you just want to be able to mess around with individual voices, for whatever reason.
spidermother, Jan 30 2011
  

       Ah, I meant the ones I like best...
pocmloc, Jan 30 2011
  

       Essentially, this exists, it just isn't generally released to the public. Any studio software does what you are enaudioning.
marklar, Jan 30 2011
  


 

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