SPDMX: Large-Scale Open Stem Audio From Symbolic Music

Phillip Long, Eduardo Escoto, Julian McAuley, Zachary Novack

Large public datasets have driven recent progress in machine learning, from text and vision to speech and general audio. Music remains an outlier, as copyright blocks redistribution of training audio, while many modern tasks need individual stems rather than mixtures. Existing multitrack resources trade off realism, scale, and licensing, while synthetic alternatives rely on proprietary VSTs or naive open rendering that yields weak stems. We introduce SPDMX, a listening-guided rendering of public-domain PDMX scores into an openly-licensed stem corpus with aligned scores and an open render pipeline: $253{,}982$ songs, $490{,}159$ mono stems, and $5{,}469$ song-hours at $44.1$ kHz under CC BY 4.0, with paired MIDI and identifiers linking to PDMX metadata. $88{,}403$ songs ($34.8\%$; $2{,}734$ song-hours) provide multitrack supervision. To our knowledge, this is the largest openly-licensed synthetic multitrack subset by song-hours, enabling source separation, stem-conditioned synthesis, MIDI-to-audio, transcription, and joint symbolic-audio modeling. We release the corpus, metadata, and open pipeline for reuse on other symbolic collections. Demos and experimental notes are on the…