RAVE: Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder

Official implementation of RAVE: A variational autoencoder for fast and high-quality neural audio synthesis (article link) by Antoine Caillon and Philippe Esling.

If you use RAVE as a part of a music performance or installation, be sure to cite either this repository or the article !

If you want to share / discuss / ask things about RAVE you can do so in our discord server !

Please check the FAQ before posting an issue!

RAVE VST RAVE VST for Windows, Mac and Linux is available as beta on the corresponding Forum IRCAM webpage. For problems, please write an issue here or on the Forum IRCAM discussion page.

Tutorials : new tutorials are available on the Forum IRCAM webpage, and video versions are coming soon!

• Tutorial: Neural Synthesis in a DAW with RAVE
• Tutorial: Neural Synthesis in Max 8 with RAVE
• Tutorial: Training RAVE models on custom data

Previous versions

The original implementation of the RAVE model can be restored using

git checkout v1

Installation

Install RAVE using

pip install acids-rave

Warning It is strongly advised to install torch and torchaudio before acids-rave, so you can choose the appropriate version of torch on the library website. For future compatibility with new devices (and modern Python environments), rave-acids does not enforce torch==1.13 anymore.

You will need ffmpeg on your computer. You can install it locally inside your virtual environment using

conda install ffmpeg

Colab

A colab to train RAVEv2 is now available thanks to hexorcismos !

Usage

Training a RAVE model usually involves 3 separate steps, namely dataset preparation, training and export.

Dataset preparation

You can know prepare a dataset using two methods: regular and lazy. Lazy preprocessing allows RAVE to be trained directly on the raw files (i.e. mp3, ogg), without converting them first. Warning: lazy dataset loading will increase your CPU load by a large margin during training, especially on Windows. This can however be useful when training on large audio corpus which would not fit on a hard drive when uncompressed. In any case, prepare your dataset using

rave preprocess --input_path /audio/folder --output_path /dataset/path --channels X (--lazy)

Training

RAVEv2 has many different configurations. The improved version of the v1 is called v2, and can therefore be trained with

rave train --config v2 --db_path /dataset/path --out_path /model/out --name give_a_name --channels X

We also provide a discrete configuration, similar to SoundStream or EnCodec

rave train --config discrete ...

By default, RAVE is built with non-causal convolutions. If you want to make the model causal (hence lowering the overall latency of the model), you can use the causal mode

rave train --config discrete --config causal ...

New in 2.3, data augmentations are also available to improve the model's generalization in low data regimes. You can add data augmentation by adding augmentation configuration files with the --augment keyword

rave train --config v2 --augment mute --augment compress

Many other configuration files are available in rave/configs and can be combined. Here is a list of all the available configurations & augmentations :

Export

Once trained, export your model to a torchscript file using

rave export --run /path/to/your/run (--streaming)

Setting the --streaming flag will enable cached convolutions, making the model compatible with realtime processing. If you forget to use the streaming mode and try to load the model in Max, you will hear clicking artifacts.

Prior

For discrete models, we redirect the user to the msprior library here. However, as this library is still experimental, the prior from version 1.x has been re-integrated in v2.3.

Training

To train a prior for a pretrained RAVE model :

rave train_prior --model /path/to/your/run --db_path /path/to/your_preprocessed_data --out_path /path/to/output

this will train a prior over the latent of the pretrained model path/to/your/run, and save the model and tensorboard logs to folder /path/to/output.

Scripting

To script a prior along with a RAVE model, export your model by providing the --prior keyword to your pretrained prior :

rave export --run /path/to/your/run --prior /path/to/your/prior (--streaming)

Pretrained models

Several pretrained streaming models are available here. We'll keep the list updated with new models.

Realtime usage

This section presents how RAVE can be loaded inside nn~ in order to be used live with Max/MSP or PureData.

Reconstruction

A pretrained RAVE model named darbouka.gin available on your computer can be loaded inside nn~ using the following syntax, where the default method is set to forward (i.e. encode then decode)

This does the same thing as the following patch, but slightly faster.

High-level manipulation

Having an explicit access to the latent representation yielded by RAVE allows us to interact with the representation using Max/MSP or PureData signal processing tools:

Style transfer

By default, RAVE can be used as a style transfer tool, based on the large compression ratio of the model. We recently added a technique inspired from StyleGAN to include Adaptive Instance Normalization to the reconstruction process, effectively allowing to define source and target styles directly inside Max/MSP or PureData, using the attribute system of nn~.

Other attributes, such as enable or gpu can enable/disable computation, or use the gpu to speed up things (still experimental).

Offline usage

A batch generation script has been released in v2.3 to allow transformation of large amount of files

rave generate model_path path_1 path_2 --out out_path

where model_path is the path to your trained model (original or scripted), path_X a list of audio files or directories, and out_path the out directory of the generations.

Discussion

If you have questions, want to share your experience with RAVE or share musical pieces done with the model, you can use the Discussion tab !

Demonstration

RAVE x nn~

Demonstration of what you can do with RAVE and the nn~ external for maxmsp !

embedded RAVE

Using nn~ for puredata, RAVE can be used in realtime on embedded platforms !

Frequently Asked Question (FAQ)

Question : my preprocessing is stuck, showing 0it[00:00, ?it/s]
Answer : This means that the audio files in your dataset are too short to provide a sufficient temporal scope to RAVE. Try decreasing the signal window with the --num_signal XXX(samples) with preprocess, without forgetting afterwards to add the --n_signal XXX(samples) with train

Question : During training I got an exception resembling ValueError: n_components=128 must be between 0 and min(n_samples, n_features)=64 with svd_solver='full'
Answer : This means that your dataset does not have enough data batches to compute the intern latent PCA, that requires at least 128 examples (then batches).

Funding

This work is led at IRCAM, and has been funded by the following projects

• ANR MakiMono
• ACTOR
• DAFNE+ N° 101061548