billroper: (Default)
billroper ([personal profile] billroper) wrote2024-09-28 11:28 pm
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Fumble!

I was playing around in the studio late this afternoon and decided that I wanted to try decomposing a WAV file to stems. I've done this trick before using Izotope RX 10 and I figured it was worth trying again. it worked, although not quite as well as I might have hoped, because the choices of how to split up the instruments into the stems were pretty limited.

Now, the technology for splitting a mixed file into stems has been getting better and better. On the very high end, there's what Peter Jackson did to remix the audio for his Beatles documentary a couple of years ago. And the nice things about really high end technology is that it has a way of trickling down. So I did some research on the Internet and discovered that there are a number of choices, including Steinberg's SpectraLayers Pro, which has a one month free trial right now.

Free. Free is a good price. :) I downloaded it on the studio computer and went at it. The results were pretty good.

But then I messed something up trying to save the individual stems. I'm still not sure what. The net result was that I overwrote the original WAV file.

That's ok. There's a backup on the NAS.

Which now contained the overwritten version of the file. More poking around on the NAS found nothing in the way of older, untouched backups.

Damn, damn, damn. This is the thing that I promised Gretchen I would never do with digital recording.

And then the light went on. I went upstairs to the dining room and turned on the *old* studio computer, which I had moved there for general usage when I built a new studio computer. There was the folder and there was the file.

I have copied the file to a transfer folder so I can get it back down to the basement.

At some later date, I will figure out *how* I managed to overwrite the original file instead of writing out the stems. The documentation for the new version of SpectraLayers is being opaque.

But I will figure this out.

Before the trial runs out. :)