Audio-to-Audio via Diffusion Warm Initialization
In this paper, we propose diffusion warm initialization as a simple yet effective approach for a range of audio-to-audio transformation tasks. To illustrate the generality of the approach, we demonstrate its use in timbre transfer, MIDI-to-Real synthesis, and multiple audio enhancement tasks. We conduct a detailed empirical analysis on timbre transfer to investigate the role of the initialization time t_init. The effect of t_init is evaluated using pitch-based Jaccard Distance and Fréchet Audio Distance to quantify faithfulness to the input signal and alignment with the target distribution. Our results provide practical guidance for selecting t_init and show that, once properly chosen, a single pretrained diffusion model combined with warm initialization can support multiple transformation objectives without task-specific training or conditioning. Despite its simplicity, this approach already achieves competitive results when compared with more complex pipelines designed specifically for these tasks.