Papers for

music audio engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

MixAgent automates music post-production using audio examples and critiques

Agentic Music Post-Production

Abstract: We introduce MixAgent, an agentic pipeline for music post-production that follows the workflow of audio engineers to build interpretable and editable mixing plans guided by a reference song. A grouping agent first routes related input tracks, such as drum recordings, into subgroups. A planning agent then uses retrieved examples to choose and order audio effects, such as volume control and reverb, for tracks, subgroups, and the full mix. To refine the mix, a detector identifies what needs correction, and a critic proposes numerical parameter adjustments from tracks to the full mix. In our experiments, prompting recent multimodal models to listen and revise often worsens the mix, making reliable correction a central challenge. We therefore build MixCritic, a dataset of 45,657 repair critiques derived from parameters fitted to professional mixes, and train the critic with supervised fine-tuning followed by preference optimization on rendered audio outcomes. On MedleyDB, learned refinement reduces error by 19% relative to the initial mix, with preference optimization reducing it by 8.4% over supervised training alone. Retrieved examples further improve effects selection, and a human listening test shows that MixAgent gets higher quality ratings than mixes produced by Qwen3-Omni, Gemini 3.8 Flash and GPT-4o-audio.

Wed 21 OctSoundArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Mixing music after recording is hard because it involves many steps and decisions to get the sound just right. The authors created MixAgent, a tool that mimics how audio engineers work by grouping tracks, choosing effects, and fixing issues based on examples and feedback. They found that simply asking AI models to improve mixes often made them worse, so they made a special dataset and trained a system called MixCritic to better suggest corrections. In tests, MixAgent improved music mixes and was rated better than mixes made by other AI models.
Open → 2610.29093v1