Jalaj P. Jha » Songsmith download http://jalaj.net Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:59:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Microsoft Songsmith: Another Cameo from Microsoft? http://jalaj.net/2009/02/01/microsoft-songsmith-another-cameo-from-microsoft/ http://jalaj.net/2009/02/01/microsoft-songsmith-another-cameo-from-microsoft/#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 08:55:41 +0000 Jalaj http://jalaj.wordpress.com/?p=962 Microsoft Songsmith is the new software from Microsoft Research that just recently hit the market. It has received more brickbats than bouquets. “Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice.” is what developers intended when they developed it, and users saw it as a remixer and in no time YouTube got flooded with videos that sounded funny with Microsoft Songsmith generated accompaniment music over original vocal rip-offs from hit songs. If you also want to give it a try, download the trial version which runs for 6 hours of usage, full version available on payment of $29.95

The story of Microsoft Songsmith is not as simple as it seems. It starts with Band in a Box (BAIB) which is a style-based arrangement tool from PG Music, which can take plain Chords as inputs and generate more musical outputs. However this software does not recognize vocal inputs. Here is where MySong project , a research project by Dan Morris, Sumit Basu, Ian Simon come in. MySong project aimed at developing a tool that can generate chords from singer’s voice which in turn could be fed to Band in a Box to generate a pleasant musical sequence. The MySong Project page and the research paper has references to Band in a Box everywhere and the same was used for the final outputs throughout.

The MySong project ended in first quarter of 2008. And beginning of 2009 comes in Microsoft Songsmith with ‘Band in a Box’ packaged in Microsoft box, powered by MySong which fills the gap between singer’s voice and input to be fed to BAIB.

About the remix phenomenon spreading across YouTube, Microsoft spokesman Mike Houlihan says Songsmith is being "used in ways we haven't quite imagined." Now with MySong and BAIB in a single shell named Microsoft Songsmith, which software is actually responsible for flaws in generated outputs when user use it in un-imagined way and get resultsthat’s even more un-imagined? I think no one can tell!

Now why did I call this a software a Cameo in the title? For it reminds me of a similar quick development in the past named ‘Art of Office’. Initially a small startup site aoo.bitcrossing.com, it suddenly went on to become a Microsoft site. While a Microsoft site is expected to attract a lot of users and traffic, it is still, after more than 18 months, struggling for both traffic and users. While its traffic is less on Alexa even in comparison to this blog, I am there amongst the Top Artists with just two uploads. Similarly Microsoft Songsmith, seems to be a Microsoft quicky with small term goals and least commercial value and can fade soon from the minds of people. I am still to test Microsoft Songsmith which I have already downloaded (98MB) but lacks .Net framework 3.0 (which would be another 70MB download) Let’s see if it can work with my voice hhmmm..

What according to you is the future of Microsoft Songsmith?

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