Sound Serenity: Tape It Introduces AI-Powered Noise Reduction for Musicians

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. after apple decided to pull and put an end essentially to its music memos app which i think was really loved by a lot of musicians for essentially like coming up with song ideas the startup tape has decided to step up to the plate and i guess kind of fit into the same space so essentially this is a new company they have a new ai powered noise reduction algorithm which is capable of transforming any audio into studio quality sound i watched a demo well it's yeah Yeah, so I've played around with them and looked at a demo of what they're capable of doing.

0:59And I've also looked at kind of their like intro video explaining a little bit about their algorithm and how it works and whatnot. And I have to say it's a fairly solid, like it definitely does the job. So it's a solid company, solid software pass. My only thing that I have doubts on is whether they're going to be able to really stand out when you have someone like Adobe Audio Enhancer, who technically does offer the same service for free. And I've been using it for almost a year now. and so like there definitely are other things in the space and when they come from a big company you you know there's definitely going to be some competition there so they are doing some interesting things and I want to cover those specifically on the podcast but essentially this is an AI based denoiser and it was launched this week as a it has I think a complimentary web app but tape it which I think is called tape it has revealed plans to license the technology to other vendors.

1:51And later the denoiser is going to be integrated into tape its main app. Now, the reason why I think that's interesting there is because Adobe right now has the product and you can go use it yourself, but they're not doing an API. And I honestly think there's some massive potential for any startup that launches an API. An example of this is like mid journey for image creation is an incredible platform, but like it doesn't have an API and I have lots of software products that I would love to build the functionality of mid journey into. And I'm not going to go right at this very moment, go through the work of setting up an API and building that all up myself, especially because it's built on discord, which is, I don't know, kind of weird.

2:29And, you know, they could change things at any time and it wrecked my whole API. So I'm just not going to go through that. And when you have something like Dolly that came out and I'm like, yeah, Dolly's like fairly good, almost as good. I'm just going to grab Dolly and integrate it. And maybe a mid journey comes out with an API in the future and I'll make that my priority. But like at the moment, it's like it's you kind of have to look at the best technology. That's also the easiest to implement. So when there's really high barriers to entry, it's definitely going to slow down your platform's adoption.

2:56So all that being said, Adobe does not have the API and Tape It does. And so I think Tape It's going to have a lot of success in a sense that platforms are going to be able to add this functionality to their platform and, you know, essentially have this amazing effect without having to go and develop this technology in-house. And, you know, I'm sure they would all love to have Adobe Audio Enhancer, but Adobe Audio Enhancers trying to keep that for themselves and not share it. So I think in this regard, Tape It is going to see some solid success. And I do see like a really strong path for this company because of that.

3:30So Tape It was essentially the idea of Thomas Walter and Jan Nash. Both of them are musicians who founded the company back in 2020. And the objective behind Tape It was to offer a user-friendly solution similar to Apple's Memo app. But essentially, they had, you know, enhanced some AI capabilities that were built into this. So Walter's experience at Spotify after its acquisition of his startup Sonalytic, combined with Nash's background in classical opera and engineering, gave the ideal founders, the whole idea for for tape it. So the initial version of tape it app automatically detected musical instruments and annotated recordings with some visual markers.

4:12And it was kind of simplifying the retrieval process for musicians, users could also customize the recordings with additional notes, markers and photos. And the app quickly gained a lot of popularity, I think had around 10 ,000 monthly active users, which is really impressive. however I think the team's aspirations didn't quite stop there they continued to really focus on integrating the like AI into their platform which I think resulted in the latest offering which is their AI powered denoiser and this I think they said like they built this thing over two years so it took a minute but essentially the tool addressed the problem faced by musicians which was of course background noise is very common unlike conventional noise reduction methods which require expensive studio setups and intricate software.

5:00Tape It's solution is simple, right? You just, you know, the AI really quickly just removes any distracting sounds, hums, hisses, all that kind of stuff. Gives you a great audio quality. The same thing that, you know, I get done with Adobe Audio Enhancer for every single podcast episode. So I think this is interesting. Walter's trying to like highlight how novel this tool is. and I'm not sure what his opinion is on like Adobe Audio Enhancer, which has been out for a while, but essentially he said, quote, what we developed is an automatic version of the denoising software you'd find in professional studios over the past 15 years.

5:37I think this startup conducted an academic study to prove the efficiency of their product against some leading industry denoisers. And I think the uniqueness of Tapit's AI method is evident. Walter said we're the first to train such a system, which is of course a bold claim considering Adobe has a audio enhancer. So in a detailed video, the company kind of elaborated on how most existing noise reduction systems either focus solely on speech or necessitate expert manual intervention. So Tapit's method, I think, and maybe what they're calling groundbreaking here is linking a neural network controller to a noise reduction algorithm, which is enabling auto denoising of a really big variety of audio signals.

6:26And I will give it to them. Like they're doing this on music, which is definitely gonna be harder than just audio, right? Like here I'm sitting talking and they can figure out like if, you know, one of my kids screams in the background. I don't know if you guys hear that, but definitely happens while I'm recording podcasts. And so Adobe Audio Enhancer can chop that out. But like if you're singing a song and there's like a violin that's really high pitch and a guitar like being able to pick out all the different instruments and remove the background noise without removing like the instruments and the vocals i think is a lot harder so i will give it to them that they're doing something you know probably a lot harder than adobe audio enhancer although i have thrown songs in there i will say adobe audio enhancer one area i think it struggles with a bit is when you have multi voices so i'm i'm I wonder if anyone has really seen this before, but like sometimes when I do interviews, I run all the audio for my interviews through Adobe Audio Enhancer.

7:19And sometimes I feel like when it's trading off between me and the person talking, it can like, it can like mute them a little early. So like their word gets cut off or it gets quieter or the same at the start of my words or whatever. So like there is that issue. And I think that that would have been, that'd be super exacerbated in music. And so I don't really think Adobe Audio Enhancer would be a viable tool here, which is why I think something like Tape It would be a really successful option. And I think, you know, discussing kind of the broader potential for AI in the creative sector, Walter, who's our CEO, said, quote, While many are thrilled about AI's creative potential, we're passionate about AI tackling mundane challenges.

7:58We handle background noise so artists can zero in on their creativity. I think it's smart of them. They're really kind of focused on the specific niche of artists and musicians. built something specific for this because all audio, you know, might be a little bit big and have a lot of competition. I think the influence of AI in refining audio quality isn't confined just to music. Several firms like Podcastle with its recent Magic Dust AI are leveraging AI to produce really good sounding like audio for podcasters. Tapeit's team though is from Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Stockholm. They got a bunch of solid, you know, really talented audio researchers there.

8:38And so I think despite previous funding offers, the company has been completely bootstrapped to maintain its technological edge. Walter, talking about this, said, quote, our work is rooted in research and the unpredictability of the timeline made us wary of investor pressure. However, I think given the rapid evolution of the AI landscape, Tape Tape is now looking at doing a round of funding, although no official decisions. They haven't announced it publicly yet. But I definitely think this is one that you'd probably want to keep an eye on. And they may be pulling something in the future. And I think there is a lot of potential for the startup.

9:12So I think it'd be very interesting to see where that goes, how much they're able to raise, whatnot. I think it's inevitable. I don't think it's like if they will or won't, but it's just when they'll raise money. So definitely an interesting startup to follow. and like I mentioned, this whole segment of the podcast was put through Tape It's noise reduction platform. I can tell you my kids are playing in the background. They got these like indoor little ziggle cars that they're zooming around the house in and yelping because it's the end of the day and they're having a lot of fun. So if you can't hear them, Tape It is doing a good job.

9:44But I mean, really listen to the quality of the audio and then compare this to other podcasts that I've done and kind of like the tone of my voice and all that kind of stuff, I think will give you a good idea of the quality that Tape It is able to do and, you know, the success that they'll see in the future.