Meta's SAM bot keeps 'em separated as it isolates voices and instruments from audio clips

Want to hear just the guitar riff from a song? How about cutting out the train noise from a voice recording? Meta says its new SAM Audio model can separate and edit sounds using simple prompts, cutting down on the manual work typical of audio-editing tools.

The release of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) Audio follows the previous release of Meta-made segmentation models for visual assets. Meta now claims that it has created "the first unified multimodal model for audio separation" in SAM Audio, which is available today on the company's Segment Anything Playground as well as for download.  

By "multimodal," Meta is referring to SAM Audio's ability to interpret three types of prompts for audio segmentation: text prompts, time-segment markings, and visual selections in video used to isolate or remove specific sounds.

Take a video of a band playing, for example, and select the guitarist to have ...