Recent versions of Chronotron rely on open-source programs to perform certain functions. Specifically, YouTube downloads are handled by yt-dlp, and the A.I. music source separation feature gives you the option to use demucs as an alternative to Spleeter. The app bundles its own versions of all required programs and their dependencies (e.g. deno and ffmpeg), so you don’t have to worry about what’s going on behind the scenes.
The maintainers of such programs update them regularly, for example, to keep up with YouTube website changes, introduce performance improvements, or address security issues. As a Chronotron user, though, you receive these updates only when the app itself is updated, resulting in an additional hop.
What if you wanted to use different executables than the bundled ones?
But wait, why would you want to do that? After all, the app is updated regularly, so if you’re patient enough, everything will continue to work as it should, right? And yes, that’s right! If you aren’t totally familiar with these programs and their dependencies, the best is not to even think about it and stop reading this post.
Still, from Release 277 on, Chronotron allows you to select different executables than the ones bundled with the app, via a new section under the Locations settings pane.
Should you rely on your own yt-dlp executable?
If you need to stay current with yt-dlp features and, as mentioned above, want to be independent from the Chronotron release schedule, then relying on your own yt-dlp executable starts to make sense.
Such independence comes in handy if you are the kind of end user who happens to rely heavily on downloading external content. Getting control of the yt-dlp version allows you to keep going even when Chronotron updates aren’t yet available (that is, as long as you’re comfortable with maintaining your own yt-dlp executable up-to-date).
What about demucs?
This one is a bit trickier, but in short, it’s about performance.
When run directly by a user, demucs is really fast; however, when Chronotron launches the demucs executable during A.I. processing, performance is far from ideal. This is because Windows disables advanced CPU features on any executable the app starts. To be clear, Chronotron itself uses all available CPU features, but limitations apply to any other program launched from the app2.
While there’s absolutely no way to let the launched executable gain better control of CPU – not even when using your own exe -, there are no such limitations when it comes to GPU support. So, if you have an Nvidia video card, you could get a demucs version supporting CUDA to improve music separation performance dramatically.
The problem is that CUDA-enabled demucs distributions can take up to 5GB of disk space, so bundling these with Chronotron isn’t practical. Thus, the ability to select a different demucs executable is there to help those who use the music separation feature frequently and prefer demucs over Spleeter3.
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What do you think? Will you use your own executables or rely on the bundled ones? Let me know in the comments section.
- The root cause is a Windows security feature that disables anything beyond SSE2 on any full-trust executable launched from a UWP app. Explaining the feature is outside the scope of this article, but if you’re curious, Grok happens to have “insider information” about it. ↩︎
- The Spleeter algorithm runs inside the app process, so it has access to all CPU features and is therefore not affected by the limitations discussed here. ↩︎
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