Stem splitters, whats the best? Is lalal.ai worth the cost?

I would love to extract vocals and leads for sampling. Is it worth paying $40 for a service or is there a better free option?

Or should I just go with the spiritual ancestors and chop and EQ them? Whats a good way to EQ out drums or do you keep the downbeat in?

I’ve use it a bit - I forked out for some minutes and still have loads left as I tend to forget about it.

It’s great when it works, and you get something really useful. And you will. But you will also get a lot of unusable results, and ti will be time not making music…

Pros and cons. You just reminded me it exists though, and I have been feeling like I need some fresh drums in my life, so I might have a session later to see if I can get some clean drums going!

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Yeah, and $40 is almost half of Eventides Physion. Which separates frequencies.

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I think Izotope RX has something like that?

I dunno, I’ve just used Koala Samplers stem splitter. It works good enough especially considering the cost.

Edit: oh for $40 that doesn’t seem that bad of a price at all. I thought it was $40 a month but it’s a one time fee? (Of course it’s on sale)

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Oh shit. Good call. I have koala sampler!

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Yeah it’s cool that Koala has one.

Lalal.ai definitely does a cleaner job than Koala… less artifacts/bleed. But it is totally a matter of if you need it at all, and what the specific per job need is. If you want clean drums in a sparse track where inperfections will stand out, then it might be no use. But a lot of imperfections probably won’t be noticeable in the full mix

The Hit’n’mix software seems to be very good at this. It has a 21 days trial.

Review in SOS: Hit'n'Mix Infinity

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I also tried Stemroller, that someone from the DnB battle used. I tried it and didn’t get anything, but the program kicked on the fan of my M1 MacBook Pro for the first time.

Might install it on my gaming PC.

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I might wait for the summer sale, I just got a Maschine mk 3, and want to upgrade to Komplete standard, and it comes with full izotope .

EDIT. It might just be the mastering stuff.

Ok this shit looks really cool.

I might check the demo out tomorrow on this.

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Let me know your opinion! If you think its cool, it might be a cool thing to check out…

I may save money and just chop around drums or search online for acapellas.

Anyone know how these compare with Serato Stems?

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This is free, open source, and way better than anything else I’ve tried: https://www.stemroller.com/

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I ended up getting Spleeter running on my computer. It uses the same underlying software/models as some of the commercial services, and is free.

Looks like this easy windows version is on its way out, so get it while you can.

https://makenweb.com/SpleeterGUI

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lalal.ai is better than spleeter in my experience.

They give 10 min audio (per month, I think?) for free.

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When I last looked into this (6 months ago maybe?) Facebook’s Demucs algorithm was far superior to Spleeter or what was in RX - much cleaner results. It wouldn’t surprise me if most of the paid tools use this under the hood, perhaps with their own tweaks on top (previously they all used Spleeter, as the actual algorithm is free and open source).

There is a GUI tool you could try to run it on your computer, assuming it is powerful enough (may not be the case!) - I’ve not tried it, I just used the Python package: https://github.com/Anjok07/ultimatevocalremovergui

$40 doesn’t seem like a bad deal for something web based which takes the hassle away though! There did used to be a free link to run Demucs via a webpage but I can’t find it now.

I think it is this https://musicprism.app though it doesnt seem to be working at the moment. This looks very promising though (if a bit slow) https://mvsep.com - allows a choice of algorithms

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+1 for spleeter. I use the command line version:

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You should definitely try Demucs - I’m not sure if Spleeter has since advanced but when Demucs came out it sounded so much clearer and less artefacty than Spleeter

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I’ve just run a bunch of ropey old demos through a few of the online DEMUCs services and what came out was surprisingly good (in technical terms, not musically…)