Why existing music source separation models are already so good (easily >10 dB SDR), but mixing engineers rarely use them? Our answer: They need music source **restoration**.
We introduce the music source restoration (MSR) task, which not only aims to separate the instruments, but also restore them to a state before any EQ, Compression, Reverb, Distortion and codec artifacts (e.g. MP3). We introduce the first dataset for this task, and found that the restoration task is much harder than separation.
Paper:
arxiv.org/abs/2505.21827
Model Code:
github.com/yongyizang/music-…
Dataset:
huggingface.co/datasets/yong…
HuggingFace Spaces:
huggingface.co/spaces/yongyi…
Work done with Zheqi Dai,
@markplumbley and
@QiuqiangK . We are organizing a MSR challenge - if you are interested in participating, co-organizing or just learning more about this, please reach out to myself (zyy0116@gmail.com) or Prof. Qiuqiang Kong (qqkong@ee.cuhk.edu.hk)!