There are five choices to separate out your audio, which include four stems (vocals, drums, bass and other), then Acapella, Backing, Drums or Bass, plus backing track. The benefit is that it uses GPU-powered servers to deliver faster processing times – you can cue up multiple files and set several tracks going while you make a cup of tea. You have to download the software to your computer but it uses cloud processing, so you’ll also need a high-speed internet connection.

XTRAX STEMS has been designed solely for separating audio.

Price $32 (6-month subscription), $48 (1-year subscription).

Click the Render button to generate new audio based on your setting or choose Separate to spit out separate stems that can be exported for use. There are three quality settings, and a Separation slider, on which 0 is more natural but with more bleed between stems, and 100 is maximum separation but likely to have more artefacts. It allows you to separate your audio into Vocal, Bass, Percussion and Other streams, and lets you rebalance their individual volumes. The module we’re interested in, though, is Music Rebalance, introduced back in version 7.

Price $399 (RX 9 Standard), $1,199 (RX 9 Advanced) – also available in Music Production Suite 4.1 alongside other great plug-insĪ longtime favourite of the post-production world, iZotope’s flagship audio editing and restoration software is packed with useful tools for cleaning up and manipulating audio.

Here, we take a look at six stem-separation tools and put them to the test by loading in some fully mixed audio. Remember, though, you’ll need to acquire permission to publish any kind of copyrighted material. The following tools can add a massive degree of flexibility to mashups and DJ sets, and can even create broken-down stems for remixing into film and TV music cues.

Rx9 ozone