Drag any finished stereo track into Live, right-click it, and choose Split Stems. A few seconds later you have four clips: drums, bass, vocals and everything else. No plug-in, no upload, no subscription — it runs on your machine.
How to use it
- Drop an audio file onto a track, or select a clip already in your set.
- Right-click and choose Split Stems.
- Pick the quality. Faster is genuinely usable for sketching; the slower setting is what you want if the result is going in a track.
- Live creates a Group Track with one track per stem, each warped and ready.
What it is actually good for
- Remixing. An acapella out of a finished record, in one right-click.
- Learning. Solo the bass on a record you love and hear exactly what it is playing, with nothing on top of it.
- DJ edits. Drop the vocal, keep the drums. Or the reverse.
- Rescuing your own work. A bounced mix from years ago with no session file is no longer a dead end.
What it is not
It is not magic and it is not lossless. Separation leaves artefacts — a watery, slightly phasey quality on isolated vocals, and cymbals bleeding into the "other" stem. Push a separated stem loud and solo in a quiet mix and everyone will hear it.
So use the stems as ingredients, not as finished parts. A separated vocal sitting on new drums with a bit of reverb is fine. A separated vocal alone at the front of a mix is not.
And the obvious one: separating someone else's record does not give you the right to release it. That is a clearance question, not a technical one.
Do this now
Take a track you know well. Split it. Solo each stem in turn and listen to what the producer actually did — how loud the bass really is against the kick, how much reverb is on the vocal, how little is often going on in the "other" stem. It is the fastest reverse-engineering tool you have.