The Music Business Buddy
A podcast that aims to educate and inspire music creators in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. A new episode is released each Wednesday and aims to offer clarity and insight into a range of subjects across the music industry. The series includes soundbites and interviews with guests from all over the world together with commentary and clarity on a range of topics. The podcast is hosted by award winning music industry professional Jonny Amos.
Jonny Amos is the author of The Music Business for Music Creators (Routledge/ Focal Press, 2024). He is also a music producer with credits on a range of major and independent labels, a songwriter with chart success in Europe and Asia, a senior lecturer at BIMM University UK, a music industry consultant and an artist manager.
www.jonnyamos.com
The Music Business Buddy
Episode 58: AI Powered Mixing With RoEx CEO David Ronan
Ever wondered how artificial intelligence might transform music production without replacing human creativity? In this eye-opening conversation with David Ronan, CEO of Roex Audio, we explore the fascinating world of AI-powered mixing and mastering tools that are changing how music creators work.
David pulls back the curtain on Roex's innovative products: Mix Check Studio, which analyzes tracks and identifies mixing issues for free, and Automix, which can professionally mix up to 32 tracks in minutes rather than hours. What's particularly impressive is how these tools handle the mechanical, often tedious aspects of mixing while leaving the creative decisions to humans. "It doesn't do anything creative," David explains, "it does the corrective mixing... getting the levels correct enough that you're in the ballpark and can tweak it." The result? More time for music creators to focus on the artistic elements that make their sound unique.
With a background that includes work at Native Instruments, leading research at AI Music (later acquired by Apple), and a PhD in music technology, David brings exceptional expertise to the table. He shares the remarkable journey of how Roex evolved from an academic project that could only mix four mono tracks over an entire day to a sophisticated system that can handle complex arrangements in minutes. Along the way, he dispels myths about AI replacing human engineers, emphasizing that these tools are assistive rather than replacements, democratizing professional-quality sound while enhancing the productivity of experienced professionals.
Looking ahead, David reveals exciting plans for DAW integration and applications beyond music production into film, television, and game audio. Whether you're a bedroom producer struggling with technical aspects of mixing or a professional engineer looking to streamline workflow, this episode offers valuable insights into how AI can help you achieve better results while preserving your creative vision. Give it a listen and discover how embracing these new technologies might transform your music production process.
https://www.roexaudio.com/
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The Music Business Buddy. The Music Business Buddy. Hello everybody and a very, very warm welcome to you. You're listening to the Music Business Buddy with me, johnny Amos, podcasting out of Birmingham in England. I'm the author of the book the Music Business for Music Creators, available in hardback, paperback and ebook format. I'm a music creator with a variety of credits as a writer, producer, I'm also a consultant, an artist manager and a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business. Wherever you are and whatever you do, consider yourself welcome to this podcast and to a part of the community around it. I'm here to try and educate and inspire music creators from all over the world in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music.
Speaker 1:Okay, so in this week's podcast I am interviewing David Ronan, who is the CEO of Roex Audio. So if you've never heard of Roex Audio before, they are an AI-powered mix and mastering service. They say you can unlock studio-quality sound with intelligent audio tools. Get a professional, balanced, ai-powered mix in minutes. Guys, I'll level with you. I've tested it out and it's really, really good.
Speaker 1:One of the things to kind of think about when it comes to AI services, and I know one of the fears out there sometimes can be well, is this something which replaces humans? No, it's not. It's something that assists humans, and I think that's a very important thing to try and remember here. Is it designed for people that can't mix music but that want their music mixed? Yes, but it's also designed for people that do mix music and need some kind of time-saving preparation stuff done before they actually get into the creative part of the mix process. That's a big part of any mix engineer. Right is the mix prep process, and this does that. Some of those kind of tasks on an AI level are at a much quicker rate than a human mind could.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to hand over to the interview between myself and Dave and hopefully you enjoy it. You'll see he's a really, really nice guy, my goodness me. He knows his onions when it comes to AI, when it comes to music production technology, where it's all headed, what it could look like next as well. I shall hand over now. Okay, enjoy this. So, david, welcome to the music business. Buddy, I've been wanting to talk to you for a while and I'm glad that we're finally here doing this. First and foremost, how are you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm good Thanks for having me on Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, it's good. I'm glad you're here, mate. So, Dave, let's start by understanding. Um, you know the roex product line, right? So there's, there's. So tell me if I've got any of this wrong, mate. Okay, so there's mix check studio, and then there's auto mix, right? So mix check studio is kind of free to access for music creators wanting to understand what could be improved in their mix or in their mix and mastered track, and then Automix will actually run the mix itself. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty much at a high level. Yeah, that's it. I can go a bit deeper on both if you want, and I can give you a quick overview of the company as well, if that helps. Yeah, brilliant, thank you, perfect, I mean, yeah, so I'm the founder and CEO of Roix, at a very high level. What we do is we build intelligent audio production tools for musicians, essentially to give them the confidence they need to release their music, but more specifically, that's AI-driven tools for multi-track mixing, mastering, audio sorry mix analysis, mix cleanup, mix restoration basically any of the technical challenges that come with music or kind of audio production.
Speaker 2:We probably have a tool that can help you along your way. Um, yeah, and as you, as you, mentioned, we have two kind of uh products in our line. So we have mix check studio, which is, um, it's probably the first one we officially launched and what it is is essentially, uh, anyone can come along, uh and use this for free, basically to come along, upload their mixer master track. We'll analyze it, we'll tell you what's wrong with it and then we'll tell you how to fix it, basically in in your daw, and actually what it means for your music, as well as if you don't fix it, because obviously you don't want to send off something off to spotify and it's not sounding great, um, so that that bit's free. It always will be free as long as rox is around, um, we've also recently introduced the paid feature for that.
Speaker 2:So for five quid, basically, we, um, we can take the, the problems that we found, we can fix them to the best of our ability and then we can also, uh, remix and master your track as well. So if you have stuff from like I don't know, that that was for me is perfect. I like stuff from 20 years ago, uh, that I that I made when I didn't really have a clue what I was doing and I was able to kind of like essentially remix them and remaster and they sound a lot better now. So, yeah, so that's that's kind of, that's essentially mix check studio. So that's very simple tool and the idea is that, like anyone's, if you don't have the stems which a lot of people don't, you know, or maybe you don't really know how to use a DAW and use something recorded at home, yeah, we can basically bring it back to life essentially.
Speaker 1:Do you do um? Can you do like group stem separation and stuff as well?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's how it works actually is. We do stem separation and split it down to bass, drums, vocals and everything else, and then we apply processing uh like we have modeled all these kind of fancy compressors and fancy eqs and basically remix it using our technology that we have for mixing, which I can talk about in a sec and put it back together again and then, if you have the option, to master it as well, if you need it. So essentially so it makes it very easy for anyone. If you just don't, you know, all you have is a stereo WAV or whatever MP3, we can basically fix it for you and make it sound better.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Wow, that's sorry. I just want to pause for a minute, dave, because that is it's so mind boggling, isn't it Like we're casually sat here talking about something which would have been completely unfathomable when you and I first entered this game, right? Oh yeah, 100%. I mean that's amazing, do you know? I'm just, I'm thinking out loud here, but I'm just thinking that, ok, in addition to all of those things, there's also a lot of people out there that do a lot of remote recording on platforms like Sound Better, air Gigs, that kind of thing, and it's something that we've been talking about on the podcast recently the growth in the sort of creator economy and remote marketplace work that actually what you've built there would apply itself not only on mix level, but also on a restorative or repair level for people let's say, for example, someone recording vocals in their bedroom and go right, how do I make this sound?
Speaker 2:better. Yeah, so actually it would work for that. It would to a certain extent, but if you have the individual recordings, like the stems, you'd be better off using our other platform, which is Automix. So, yeah, I could just tell you about that, obviously. Uh, probably good way to automate.
Speaker 1:Sorry, I meant for automix. Sorry, yeah okay, yeah there's, my files make that better. That's that for automix. Sorry, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:So if you have like your multi-track recording so essentially you have your vocals, you have your bass, guitar, drums, synths, whatever it is you do, it doesn't matter what genre it is. With this other platform we have, you can come along, you can upload those and you provide some very basic mix settings, like which is the most important track in the song Usually it's the lead vocal the instrument type if there's like a panning preference you want to have on the left or the right, whatever, or if you want some reverb added. But we also actually have this ability as well. So if you've been, if you've recorded your vocals and kind of less than ideal recording conditions like maybe you're using your phone in the park to record the vocals we can actually take that and clean it up and remove what kind of all the background noise. So essentially, because the thing about a mix is like it's garbage in, garbage out, so the better the signals, the audio signals, going into it, the better your, your eventual final mix will be. So we've also got stuff in there as well. So if it's like it's a band, a live band recording, we can actually remove the microphone bleed and all the kind of the rest of the stuff that you might have like challenges you might have with a live recording. So essentially, we can give you, then give you back, uh, yeah. So the idea being that, like we can give you back a mixed and master track back in minutes instead of days, very low cost, so we can mix up the 32 channels of audio and combine them, balanced all the tracks out and kind of combine together to give you a really nice mix and actually the beauty of what we've.
Speaker 2:Uh, we, we launched a kind of an extra feature there just after Christmas. So not only can you just download it as a final WAV, mp3 or FLAC or whatever it is you want, you can actually download it as an Ableton Live project file. So what I mean by that is yeah, so what we'll have done is we'll take your unprocessed audio it into an ableton live project file, but we'll then configure ableton as if it's been mixed, if you know what I mean. So essentially, we've set the eqs, we've set the compressors, we've set all the volumes and faders. So then you're, you can basically download it or open up your ableton project file and you have a mix there ready. So, like, you just basically need to tweak stuff if you want, or else you add your creative stuff on top. We've all.
Speaker 2:We've done that now for bitwig, pre-sonic, studio one and cubase as well, so, and we're expanding into as many dollars and the view that is, like it's because it's fully, then at that point you can just balance it out if you're happy with it, or you can tweak it, so it's very assistive at that point. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:It's getting you to the 90% point and then you can do what you want on top of that. Basically, that's amazing, oh my God. Okay, so that's giving me a load more questions now. So that's brilliant. So I guess then in that case, when let's say, people go right, yeah, I'm really happy with this, let me go and download my ableton project file or my cubase file, they'll be able to see what's actually been done exactly this eq's done this, this compressor's done that and it's all using, like the native plugins within that door yes, it's using the stock plugins
Speaker 2:and yeah as you said, like, the beauty is that you can learn from this. You can see actually that's the other thing I must say as well, in the app we do an actual kind of read out and go look, this is what we did to your bass guitar, this is what we did to your drums. Very high level of stuff, Not like super detailed. You know, like this, this frequency, I did this, Um.
Speaker 1:But you all right, I can see why they boosted the bass or why they did it at that frequency. So it's quite, yeah, it's quite educational for people to want to learn. It certainly is. It certainly is, you know. It's just making me think something else as well. You know the fear very often amongst many music creators, amongst many people, I suppose, when it comes to AI, just you know, is, oh, you know, is this going to replace us? I'm just thinking out loud here again, dave, but I'm thinking actually, rather than this become something that kind of replaces a mix engineer, it actually could become something that assists a mix engineer because, as we all know, as mix engineers, you know there's a lot of prep work, right, there's a lot of restoration, balancing, all that kind of stuff. And actually, to use this, you mentioned about that final 10 percent there, which perhaps is the artistry of uniqueness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, the artistry. You're not taking that away, you're just taking away the stuff that came before it.
Speaker 2:That takes hours, yeah, it's like it, basically like the, the system we have. It's it's not. It doesn't do anything creative, it's very mechanical. It's like it does the, the corrective mixing it's called the technical term. It's just basically eqing out the bad stuff, getting the levels kind of vaguely or not vaguely correct, but correct enough that you can. You're in the ballpark and you can tweak it. So then it's at that point like okay, oh, I want to add, you know, some flanger, I want to add like chorus, whatever, make it sound more like me and this is my unique style maybe a bit of saturation, whatever. Um, and it doesn't take away from that. In fact it gives you more time to experiment with the fun stuff.
Speaker 1:Essentially it just takes care of the mechanical, boring stuff so if you're a professional, think about it this way um you know you're, you're say you're, I don't know.
Speaker 2:You're on fiverr and you sell your services. Maybe you're doing 10 mixes a week. Now. Suddenly you can click a button that gets you 90 of the way there on the mix and then you can spend more time making it sound like you. Maybe now you could do 20 hours or, sorry, 20 mixes per week because you've just saved so much time on all the prep work effectively yeah, totally, totally, wow, um god, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:So staying on automix then? So it has the ability obviously save time, as we've talked about there, but also perhaps even reduce some of the costs of the kind of the premium plug-in kind of mix software that people would not have to outlay on because you know they're getting it from you. Is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 2:I mean we've like, yeah, we've obviously designed our own EQs, compressors, all that kind of good stuff. And then we've taken it one step further, like we're really into, we love like old gear as well. We've like models like the old LA-2A compressors. We've models the Pultec EQ which are kind of like go-to audio effects that, like, professionals would use. So, yeah, you don't really have to buy them. I mean, you could buy them if you want to like add, you know, a particular sound of them to your, to your mix or whatever. But like, in terms of like making things sound good, like you know, we, we have all that stuff basically, so you don't have to to spend a lot of money on plugins.
Speaker 1:I mean, I personally love buying plugins, but like yeah, yeah, but some people know people might not necessarily have the money or might not have interest in it.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. So you know they just want to, yeah, yeah, if they come from very creative backgrounds. They don't really care about the technical differences between different cues and compressors, you know what I mean, and they just want it to sound good effectively.
Speaker 1:That's kind of where we fill that gap yeah, that, that that that makes a lot of sense. I mean it. This fills such a void for so many music creators. You know that, just that ability to I can't even put a number I wouldn't even begin to know where to put a number on the amount of music creators that come to me that say you know, I've got this project, I've got this song, it means everything to me, it's good. I just can't quite get it to that extra.
Speaker 1:You know, and I'll go, it's a mix thing, and they go, I know it's a mix thing, and um, and then you know, they might bring in, you know, this mix engineer. It hasn't really worked out, they didn't get it, they threw too much themselves into it or whatever. And and actually very often in those kind of cases it's not necessarily that they need um, uh, a, uh I'm gonna say a human here, right, because they really just need an enhanced version of what they've already created, as opposed to a new person to come in and kind of command a new direction on it. There are so many people that fit that bill and this is kind of the answer for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just essentially it gets you, as I said to the 90% point and then you know after that it's like just you tweaking. Basically, you know you're already at a good point where it sounds good and it's just a case of like, okay, exact, perfect example would be like the vocal could be a bit louder, because I love you know, I want to hear my voice more. You just have to, you know. I mean just, I mean your granny could adjust the volume on something. You know what I mean. It's very easy to kind of boost and cut vocals, essentially. So when it gets to that point where, like, you're not really having to make the big decisions, it's just minor tweaks just to kind of get it kind of honed into.
Speaker 1:You know essentially where you want it to be yeah, yeah, totally, and it is a lot of the the sort of time-consuming, more sort of boring tasks, right, that kind of take up a lot of the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know, for many mix engineers, exactly, I mean I remember like when I, when I was learning to mix and master, and like the first thing you do is like you learn to roll off certain frequencies and certain tracks and all this kind of like very mechanical not yeah, it is very mechanical kind of like standard techniques that you need to do, and I was like surely you could automate this. You know what I mean, because if you do this, you do this in every mix regardless. So you know, it does a lot of that stuff. You know, which is kind of. You know it just takes time obviously out of the, until it takes time before the part where you want to actually kind of like oh, you know, it's the fun stuff, effectively, you know.
Speaker 1:So well, yeah, yeah, yeah, tell me. Well, let's understand a little bit more about your background, because I've done some reading up on you, dave, and you, you, you. So you studied your phd under professor john rice, who was one of the founders of of lander, and then you also worked at native instruments during your phd. That that must have been a pretty eye-opening kind of experience for your, like academic and professional life yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think I mean it all kind of started I did a master's in music tech and then before that I did math and stuff like that, but uh, it was.
Speaker 2:I came back to do yeah, I did my. I started my PhD in 2013 with it was Josh Royce um, he's, yeah, he was the found one of the original founders of Lander, and I'm trying to remember I think at the start he was just I think it was just starting to kick off around then 2013. Um, so it was what was interesting for me then as kind of on my journey was like seeing josh start lander and being around that and seeing how that kind of unfolded. I guess, because startups, like all that kind of startup stuff was new to me and that was quite interesting.
Speaker 2:Um, but then having the ability in the middle to take a break, so I took a pause in the middle of my in or my phd, to go work at native instruments in berlin and I think for me having just I'd spent like maybe a year and a half doing a lot of theory and kind of learning about machine learning and ai and all that kind of good stuff, but it was there that I got actually get to apply it and learn from people who are already working in the field, and just I got to live in Berlin as well, which I would consider my spiritual home at this point Love, love visiting the place.
Speaker 2:But yeah, that was amazing. Just the amount of stuff that I learned, the amount of synthesizers I got to play with and just the amount of good music I got to do like living in, yeah, it was really eye-opening and it kind of like, anyway, I kind of knew. Then I was like, okay, I need to obviously stay and work within the kind of music tech industry and yeah, then I had to go back and finish my PhD, which was tough, leaving Berlin, but obviously it was worth the end.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, well, yeah, okay, but that's so cool. I mean, what was it like at, uh, at native instruments, what, what? What kind of place was that like to work at?
Speaker 2:uh, really good, really great work. Culture and environment, because I was working for the reese in the research team, um, so I think that, uh, matagalic would have been kind of the over boss of, or the kind of main boss of, that group and another guy called egbert jorgen, so they would have been the founders of Native, so working quite close with the founders, which was awesome. Um, just working with like really super smart people in in like DSP there was one guy was an astrophysicist, but like applying all his kind of astrophysics stuff to to, like you know, signal processing and synthesizers and stuff like that. And yeah, it was just you meet some awesome characters.
Speaker 2:Tim Exile used to work there as well. I met him a few times, but I think the beauty of it was was like everyone working there was just so passionate about music creation, music tech, nerding out on synths, so like going to work was never a chore. It was just like going to hang out with you know very like-minded individuals who were just as excited about since. So like going to work was never a chore. It was just like going to hang out with you know very like-minded individuals who were just as excited about as you were about stuff and then obviously, at the same time, very into music. So you know, the weekends you'd be going out with gigs and it never felt like work, never felt like a chore, and I really and I think it was just a really good work culture there as well because, like everyone's very collaborative, uh, it was just a nice office surrounding to place to work and, yeah, I just learned, learned a ton because everyone's very collaborative.
Speaker 2:Uh, it was just a nice office surrounding to place to work and, yeah, I just learned, learned a ton because everyone's just really engaged, you know I definitely like taking that culture that I learned there I think I've tried to everywhere I've worked since I've tried to kind of spread that kind of way to work, I guess yeah, oh yeah, absolutely yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:I really enjoyed your answer there, dave, because it reminded me of something. Several years ago I was interviewing the late great Geoff Emerick who engineered at Abbey Road, including the Abbey Road record for the Beatles. This was. He sadly died a few years ago. It was about 10 years or so ago. I met him and I said to him what was it like, you know, working at Abbey Road at that time.
Speaker 1:You know, and he said I know you want to hear great stories, he said, but it wasn't a very nice place to work. I said, oh, and I was like I wish I hadn't asked you that.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, yeah, I wish I hadn't asked you that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't eat your heroes, yeah, yeah all that you know, and it was like you've got the brown jackets, you've got the white jackets, you've got the janitors, you've got the tape engineers. They don't eat together, they don't talk when the bands come in.
Speaker 2:It's very like I was like oh God.
Speaker 1:Oh, and I was thinking, oh, I really wish, oh, please give me a nice answer. So I'm really pleased to hear that is exactly how people might imagine it, you know? Um, so yeah, talking to research, you also. Have I got. Have I got this right? Did you work as the head of research at ai music?
Speaker 2:yes, yeah, yeah. So that was my first gig after phd. Basically, um, yeah, coming to the end, I was looking for obviously something to do. I was considering going back to Berlin, but then I just AI Music popped up and just, yeah, just the project sounded really exciting and, yeah, I was the head of research there for four and a half years, so was that before Apple acquired?
Speaker 2:AI. Yeah, so essentially I was, yeah, finished phd, started there part-time initially for like a month or two and then I went full-time into as the head of head of r&d, head of research or whatever you want to call it. Um, yeah, so it was like a t? Uh I think I mean the size of the company was what I think was like, fluctuated between 17 to 20 people thereabouts. Um, yeah, I mean, the first year of it was kind of like very exploratory, kind of figuring out what we were going to do.
Speaker 2:Um, like adaptive music essentially was what we were working on, um being able to essentially have a system where you can go okay, I want a 45 second house track in the key of a minor that's 104, I don't know, it's 150 bpm and I want the drop to come in at 22 seconds and, yeah, I want different variations of it and we basically that's the system we built effectively, so any kind of. So you could basically adapt music to any kind of situation. So it was kind of the immediate use case was kind of like advertising, because, because we generated the music, there was no licensing problems. You know like, basically, you're not paying for a license, you have to speak to the rights holders, that kind of things, because we owned all the content. But the beauty of the beauty of what we were doing was none of the music was. We used AI to essentially stitch the music together and figure out the best kind of combinations of harmonically related kind of music, uh kind of samples together.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't so. We had a team of music producers who were creating music for us. The beauty of that was, uh, retained the human element of it, like so it wasn't just generated from scratch, um, which I think a lot of companies were doing at the time. They were like they had, like ai models for composition so they'd learn kind of composer composition rules, whatnot. This is different. So that was. I think that was what made the music sound so good. I think because I had that. It was well produced already and it's just a case of like us kind of reimagining it, different kind of context or like different genres, different moods, that kind of thing ah, so.
Speaker 1:So in that scenario, it was the. Uh, it was trained um, rather than you know, doing that whole scraping thing and grabbing things, as it was like music creators, that kind of put together the and then used ai to put together the ideas that they'd started to then become customized to request pretty much. Yeah, that was it.
Speaker 2:So that was the only training was like on the algorithms we used to figure out like which is the best harmonically related or that kind of stuff together. It was more kind of that understanding, that side of kind of music theory and things like that. And then obviously stuff needed to be mixed and stuff needed to sound like the whole, with the whole conveyor belt of music production. Basically for for this kind of stuff, yeah it was awesome, it was fun yeah, um, four and a half years.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, it took. It was quite the journey, um, yeah, and then ultimately it was very successful. We got acquired by apple and the beauty there was. Like I just learned loads about working at a kind of early stage startup, from the very start to, obviously, to acquisition. So which primed me to start roex, which is obviously where I am today and I've been doing for the last three years yeah, wow, that was.
Speaker 1:That was a brilliant pathway into it. Where? Where does the name roex come from, by the way? Yeah, good question.
Speaker 2:So everyone thinks it's got to do with my surname, my surname being ronan, but it actually doesn't because the original and the original name of the company was supposed to be ton, t-o-n-n, which is the irish word for for wave, sound, wave, obviously, um. But because we're we're a spin out, for we're a spin out from queen mary university, london and josh rice, the he's actually one of the directors of the company he was like we can't call it ton because he was involved in another company called tons t-o-z-t-o-n-z. So I was like, okay, that'll be a bit confusing so let's not call it that. And so we decided we settled on row x. So what row x actually means is rounded exponential and it's a type of uh filter that's used for modeling the auditory system. So there's a bit of science behind it. And it's absolutely nothing of filter that's used for modeling the auditory system. So there's a bit of science behind it.
Speaker 2:And it's absolutely nothing to do with my surname and it's just, it's two syllables, easy to remember, and you know you can kind of you could just row X your mix. You know there's a kind of a verb to it, if you want.
Speaker 1:So that was the thinking behind it. So, yeah, that's good. I'm glad you abbreviated it and made you know, made that that's because you know it's catchy, isn't it like?
Speaker 2:it is row x, a track, and I don't get to explain where it comes from very often. I'm glad you asked me, because most people just assume it's like, oh god, it's his surname, he's, he's one of those you know oh, he's an egomaniac. He's going to get after himself.
Speaker 1:He's got nothing to do with it. I wasn't sure, you know. I mean, I know what a nice guy you are, so I could see that. So I thought, no, it can't be that. But it's a lovely word. When I first heard of Roex Audio, you know, I was like what a cool name. I was like where's that come from? It's so cool because it's so hard to get a cool name, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost like the best words and the best letters have all been taken for different things. So you nailed it, it's great Cheers. So you go from like this amazing background, native and AI, and the acquisition through Apple, and seeing all that happen, and then you think back to like, right, remember all that stuff, all that mechanical stuff we learned. Right, how can we save time with that, some of this sort of thing. And then, of course, you know, along comes row x. Yeah, um, so so how? I mean, what is the process? What was the process like for kind of um, you know, for kind of understanding how to build it? Was it like like all pattern analysis and stuff, or uh, yeah, I mean like.
Speaker 2:So it originated from my phd research. So by the end of my phd I had some um like a system essentially essentially for for for mixing audio, but it would only run in the lab, lab conditions. It would essentially it could make I mean it was. So this is how useless it was when it was in the lab. It was like, basically it could mix maybe four tracks of audio. They have to be in mono and they could only be like 20 seconds in length and it would take a day to give you a result. Absolutely useless to me.
Speaker 2:But I knew that like the math and all the kind of DSP behind it was sound. Well, not all of it, but so the idea was like I needed to take some of the stuff from my PhD and then I had to come up with a lot of other new stuff to essentially turn it into a product. So that was, that was a long, that was a slog. I mean, that was, that was the beginnings of it. That was like taking all this kind of code that is not very fast and make it fast essentially and make it useful and then actually turning it into something someone can use on the web was.
Speaker 2:It was another huge change, because I come, like the thing is about, coming from an r&d background. You kind of you're more kind of playing with scripts and algorithms to kind of make it sound good and do something. There isn't really a sense. You don't. You're not building the front, the nice lovely front end that we all see and expect when you, when you, open up an app. So I had to like learn how to do that kind of stuff, uh, and make it simple enough and easy enough for people to like it. So I had to obviously go out and talk to lots of people and a lot of I mean a lot of. It probably was like having a tight feedback loop essentially with, with, with creators, and figuring out what works and what doesn't work, what resonates, um.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that took a long time, I mean that's, but that's just part and parcel of building something especially when no one had done multi-track mixing as, like lander had had kind of normalized, you know, online mastering for everyone, and we thank them for that because they they built that category, but like no one had done it for multi-track mixing. So I had to kind of come up with a way to to do that, and then we got a bit of investment, hired a team and then we started working together and we've kind of come up with what we have today, which is which works quite well and obviously it's only going to get better as time goes on. Um, so yeah, that's been kind of we're like we're just over the three. We just we've been going since may 2020 officially, so yeah, three years in the making and and yeah things are good.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's so inspiring, man, it really is. It's so inspiring Especially when you look back to those four audio tracks that it takes a day. Could you imagine the YouTube advert for that? Dave, you can put four mono tracks in here and in one day you're. It's like, you know, sometimes, like when you get an artist, it's like I've got my song. It's like I just wrote it yesterday, it's ready. I'm like, ah, hang on, hang on. You know, a month later you're like oh, okay, yeah, it's that kind of thing. It's like that passionate point of like, right, but I guess that was a eureka moment, right, where you go, okay, this does work, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like, okay, it takes a few minutes, but it can get faster.
Speaker 2:It's like well, at least a few minutes is better than waiting for like a day for someone to bring it back to you. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:So, or if you said a few yeah, that's it. So it was definitely fast.
Speaker 2:It was like I knew then, okay, it's faster than if off, point.
Speaker 2:Um, it didn't sound and it didn't. It took age to get it to sound great. I mean, we've worked like I hired a like our head of r&d. She's um, she's a really good mix engineer. I like I.
Speaker 2:I I'm not a professional mix engineer I like I, I love it, I understand it and I've worked in it. I've done a lot of mixes, my stuff and I and I get it. But like I would, I've never been like a professional. I've never like I've never spent months and months. So she's brilliant, she's like that was her background and she ended up she was actually did a phd at queen mary as well with me. So she's she's helped me really finesse it, make it sound professional. And then we had a. One of our advisors is a guy called rich keller. He's like 74 times platinum, multi grammy winning mix engineer, did all DMX and stuff. So he's been working with us as well for the last two years so he's helped us refine it. So we have had like a Grammy winning professional effectively come along and kind of help us finesse it as well. So it's got a lot of love gone into it a lot of like real kind of solid audio engineering experience has gone into it.
Speaker 1:Oh God, absolutely Wow. That's amazing that all of that brain power, all of that experience, that kind of just gets ploughed into it, that just helps people on such a monumental level. I mean, dave, what you and the guys have created there, it's proper legacy stuff, mate, it really is, it's an absolute game-changing kind of.
Speaker 1:You know it's proper legacy stuff, mate, it really is. It's an absolute game-changing kind of you know it's like um, so what, let's look ahead then finally. So what? I mean, what goals do you have kind of moving forward and what? What might the future of kind of mixing technology look like for music creators? I mean, you've already more than set the foundations for what that can be and what that is. Now what do you want to see kind of going forward?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question. So I mean, like the thing is about like we have a web app and it lives in the cloud, but the DAW is the centre of gravity for everything. I mean that's where music creation happens and I mean I predict it would probably be like that way, for I don't know for the foreseeable, I don't see how that's going to be disrupted. I mean, the doll is the doll and we get that. Um, but the problem is like with currently, at the moment you have to bounce out your stems and bring them to the cloud, and then you have to and then you want to bring them back again. So it's a bit of a gap. So we're currently working on a version of Automix where it doesn't live in the cloud. It will run on your desktop, so you just have to bounce out your stems and then basically you'll have like a sidekick Automix sidekick In fact, if you can bounce your stems, get the mix and you quickly back it up. So we're closing that gap and we're also engaged in.
Speaker 2:Obviously we've done some lightweight integrations with the DAWs, but we've actually just released a what's called an SDK, so essentially anyone can take our mixing technology now and develop it into their own product. So we're looking at, so we're working on DAW integrations at the moment. So, um, they're all discussions we're having at the moment. So for us, I mean, it's the best day out, because you might like imagine you're in ableton or wherever and you know, instead of having to balance everything out, you just push a button and it just sets all the cues, compresses, everything is set. You're like, oh, you know, I mean that's, that's, that's amazing, you know, that's, it's the best place for it, it's the best place to be um, so that's where we see the future of the technology just being fully integrated into a doll.
Speaker 2:Um, a bit further out then is like the the same, like, once we're in the doll, we're kind of we can also be in things like um, adobe, premiere da vinci, resolve those types of things. Because essentially, a lot of the problems you have with film and tv and kind of any kind of audio visual production, it's a lot of the same problems, like getting the dialogue sounding correct, balancing out the, the background with the music, all that kind of stuff, and video games as well. So that's, that's another route we're taking. So, because it's the same, a lot of the same process as for music is in, you know, in video games and film and tv.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that's kind of the future for us. I'm so glad you mentioned I was just about to ask you about games, because the growth of the indie market now in the games world is fascinating. It's just exponential growth and and like they need this we've already got.
Speaker 2:We've already got people on the platform who've like, because I obviously I talk to not as much as anymore because I'm a bit more like because I've got a team around me. But like when I was talking to our initials, like there's a lot of people, there was a lot of composers who were like, yeah, look, this is game music. I needed to be quickly mixed for my game. I'm like amazing. So that's kind of got my gears turning. Obviously I was like oh yeah, there is a whole market here, you know. So yeah, so yeah, that's, that's an interesting one for us as well oh, good for you.
Speaker 1:Wow, um, dave, thank. Thank you so much for talking to me today.
Speaker 2:Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:You know, educating the listeners on what this is all about and to not be scared of it effectively, and to just kind of embrace it.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. I got to explain more things a bit more in depth than I normally do, so, yeah, really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 1:And we know the origins of the name as well. Yes, exactly, the truth is you just named it after yourself. It's a cover story it's just a cover story.
Speaker 2:It's a cover story, yeah yeah, thanks, dave.
Speaker 1:Top man, top man Pleasure. Oh, what a good guy Dave it is. What a true gent, a good, fun guy to be around. Sorry, my laugh sound is very, very high-pitched there at the end of that conversation I don't quite know why I sounded like I was giggling like a little schoolgirl. But anyway, I hope that you enjoyed that conversation.
Speaker 1:There were many things that I found particularly fascinating in that conversation with Dave. Perhaps one of the things that I found particularly fascinating in that conversation with Dave, perhaps one of the things that was most interesting, are his plans going forward, especially on the subject of door integration. By his own admission, dave said you know, sometimes to take those stems out of your door into another platform, you know it can kind of slow the process a little bit and actually once this kind of software is licensed within the digital audio workstation, I think it might be a bit of a game changer, but it's already a game changer. But perhaps with that moving forward we could totally start to see a new way of workflow inside door technology, regardless of what door you use. So you know, really this is kind of catering for people that do mix and people that don't mix, and I think that's kind of the way to look at it, really. Anyway, I hope that's been useful.
Speaker 1:I wish you a great day ahead. Until next time, may the fours be with you. The Music Business Party. The Music Business Party.
