Splitting the Stems

Stem separation — that’s the term for extracting parts of music that are all recorded together — has come of age.

If you have any music or beats you want to manipulate, you now have the ability to get each instrument as a separate file, ready to use in your DAW. Like Peter Jackson did for the Beatles when he helped rescue Now and Then. We have several options available to us now.

I’ve tried Logic Pro 11, izotope RX11 and RipX Pro, and I’ve watched a video demo of Spectralayers. There are even some by Acon Digital and Stagecraft that can do it live.

But they have varying results in quality. But what gives you the best and cleanest results? For me it's an online service called Lalal.ai.

Good news is that it’s not a subscription! You buy packs of minutes. For each stem you separate, the minutes you process are deducted from your total and they don't expire. After uploading you get a few seconds of the beginning of your file to check the output before using your minutes.

After uploading a file in the any of the formats MP3, OGG, WAV, FLAC, AVI, MP4, MKV, AIFF or AAC, they have 10 different music parts you can extract: Vocals & Instrumental, Drums, Bass, Voice & Noise, Electric or Acoustic Guitar, Piano, Synthesizer, Strings and Wind. You can also use it to remove unwanted echo and reverb. At the moment you can only choose to process two stems at once, but I have been told they are working on letting you choose more to simplify the process. Your results are delivered as a zipped file with a suffix appended to the filename to make file management easier.

The upload and download speed is reasonable, and they also make mobile apps which I have not yet tried.

I’m pleased to announce I am now a Lalal.ai affiliate. If you want to buy some minutes to try it out, use my link. It won’t cost you anything extra.

https://www.lalal.ai/?fp_ref=jason43

Happy splitting!