[Edit: indeed, its actually good that it’s 2gb]
2gb plugin??!
Btw, does it work with tenacity?
AI models are often multiple gigabytes, tbh it’s a good sign that it’s not “AI” marketing bullshit (less of a risk with open source projects anyway). I’m pretty wary of “AI” audio software that’s only a few megabytes.
Why are they that big? Is it more than code? How could you get to gigabytes of code?
Currently, AI means Artificial Neural Network (ANN). That’s only one specific approach. What ANN boils down to is one huge system of equations.
The file stores the parameters of these equations. It’s what’s called a matrix in math. A parameter is simply a number by which something is multiplied. Colloquially, such a file of parameters is called an AI model.
2 GB is probably an AI model with 1 billion parameters with 16 bit precision. Precision is how many digits you have. The more digits you have, the more precise you can give a value.
When people talk about training an AI, they mean finding the right parameters, so that the equations compute the right thing. The bigger the model, the smarter it can be.
Does that answer the question? It’s probably missing a lot.
The current wave of AI is around Large Language Models or LLMs. These are basically the result of a metric fuckton of calculation results generated from running a load of input data in, in different ways. Given these are often the result of things like text, pictures or audio that have been distilled down into numbers, you can imagine we’re talking a lot of data.
(This is massively simplified, by someone who doesn’t entirely understand it themselves)
I thought audacity was tarnished with spyware or something these days. Is it safe again?
after looking into it:
it’s not and it never was.
a) it’s open source, so nobody’s putting that shit in there without getting caught
b) it had an opt-in error reporting feature that would send data back… that was the entire thing…
What? You must be joking. Really? The entire thing was about opt-in error reporting?
… seriously, that can’t be it, can it?
Not really that simple, it was an apparent change to the privacy policy that vaguely anticipated collection of arbitrary user data, which shook the confidence of the open source community on the project. The fact this happened right after audacity was sold was the cherry on top.
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/1213
Changes were eventually reverted or revised.
in 2021 Audacity was acquired by a company called MuseGroup who added unnecessary telemetry and they admit that they do provide the data the collect to third parties. It’s spyware as far as I’m concerned.
Point a has always me me wonder, is that accurate? Are there actually people going through the code to make sure open source isn’t malicious? I can barely read my coworkers code… Let alone a strangers.
That’s not entirely true, Audacity was acquired by a company called MuseGroup who added unnecessary telemetry and they admit that they do provide the data the collect to third parties. It’s spyware as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve been using the OpenVINO plugins for a few weeks and it’s genuinely impressive. Noise cancelling is one thing, but the transcription tool is amazing. I can create subtitles from conference recordings in minutes and create transcripts of recorded zoom calls, etc. and it does it for multiple languages.
That’s the kind of shit I like using AI for.
The music separation and speech transcription plug-ins actually sound nice. Obviously that will depend on how reliable they actually are.
I just tried the OpenVINO transcription on a random speech-over-music mp3 I happened to have: it works great, FAR better quality than I expected (I think I was expecting Youtube quality, but this is much cleaner and clearer). Perfect capitalization, good sentence breaks, adequate punctuation (commas, periods, question marks).
Only problem is that I can’t figure out how to copy the transcription so I can paste it outside Audacity: the transcriptions show up attached to specific portions of sound, like track labels. While it will save me the trouble of having to actually transcribe audio manually, to get them out of Audacity and into a word processor it looks like I may still be stuck copying each “label” individually unless I can find a way to copy or export them.
EDITED TO ADD: I just answered my own question, lol. File -> Export Other -> Export Labels -> .txt file
I read “Audacity ads” and thought for a moment they had gone to the dark side
We already had a scare with them, but turns out it was very unfair overreaction to the project.
In this case I’m happy as long as it’s hardware platform independent and uses open source released models.
AI music art has been for a long time in the hands of industry moguls and us peasants have had nothing. So I’m happy with anything that puts this power in the hands of the everyman.
Was it unfair? I haven’t been following since they got bought out by spyware?
EDIT: Audacity was acquired by a company called MuseGroup in 2021 who added unnecessary telemetry and they admit that they do provide the data the collect to third parties. Some claim the changes were reverted but I haven’t confirmed that myself so until I see there is no telemetry it’s spyware as far as I’m concerned.