Abstract
To assist with the development of intelligent mixing systems, it would be useful to be able to extract the loudness balance of sources in an existing musical mixture. The relative-to-mix loudness level of four instrument groups was predicted using the sources extracted by 12 audio source separation algorithms. The predictions were compared with the ground truth loudness data of the original unmixed stems obtained from a recent dataset involving 100 mixed songs. It was found that the best source separation system could predict the relative loudness of each instrument group with an average root-mean-square error of 1.2 LU, with superior performance obtained on vocals.