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

The Lounge General Discussion
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I had switched to UVR 5 for a while and was getting very nice results for free. Then, just for kicks, I decided to give RipX a try.

Late to the party here, but WOW. RipX isn’t going to replace my DAW, but as a stem separation and remixing tool, I’m kind of blown away. The quality of the separation is great, but it’s the DAW-like UI with insane editing capabilities for the stems and the unique way it treats audio and MIDI as one that’s really winning me over.

I’ve tried it with 3rd party tracks and loops, my own songs, and even AI generated music, and it performs like a champ. Being able to graphically cleanup in-editor and even reassign fragments of one stem to another is pretty insane, but then to also assign new sounds, change musical phrases, add harmonies, fix timings, etc. all in a single color-coded stems-based UI … never seen anything like it.

On the plus side, even though I’ve been sleeping on this, my delay means that I’m jumping on the train of a product that’s had a chance to mature for a bit.

Side note, I have a pretty good GPU and have installed the recommended CUDA tools, so stem separation is very fast.

Raw fidelity with UVR 5 may or may not be better for certain use-cases, I haven’t done a side-by-side yet. However, I’m certain that having all of the editing and deep control built into RipX as an integrated system with a unified UI is giving me better overall end results.

Downside? It ain’t free, and unfortunately, many of the features I like are in the Pro version. But as a creative tool for the music I’m doing, it’s going to be worth it.

sigh

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on musicradar Gaudio Studio (free but online) won among other five. here the article:

I havent tested any of them.

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Yes, so far there are no paid services that are that much better (than the Meta library Stemroller adds a UI) to justify their subscription service costs.

@DJSpaceP the next time you run a pass, can you zip the output of Stemroller and do the same with RipX and up to cloud storage? I’d be interested to compare the two.

I use stem separators for reverse engineering some of my favorite tracks to look into vocal and bass performance, drum programming. It’s pretty fun since many of the post-punky tracks I assume are robotic bass playing are… not “sloppy” but much more aggressive in articulation than I put together in my head :slight_smile:

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Im not expecting much from the akai stem separation for their boxes as the hardware isn’t so powerful
Certainly don’t expect good realtime separation
Offline will likely be ‘ok’ but not the best

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Apologies, but I’m not a Stemroller user. Side note, I took a look but the website doesn’t seem to currently work correctly for me, at least on my machine.

Also, I’ve temporarily (maybe permanently?) nuked UVR 5 and its models from my hard drive to free up space since I’m having such a good experience with RipX at the moment.

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No worries if it doesn’t work for your setup, I was just curious to see what the value-add is :slight_smile:

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I recently tried out Spectralayers Pro 10 which came with my Soudforge Suite license. It’s pretty amazing at unmixing tracks.

It’s not something I find myself wanting to do often but it’ll be damned good when I need it.

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Audacity added stem splitting in their new release.

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FWIW I built one to suit my needs – https://stems.app

Features:

  • Can paste a Youtube URL and split super easily
  • Lives on the desktop so you can customize download paths
  • Analyzes Key + BPM so you can easily go back through your catalog and find the Stem you need.

I’m biased but think it sounds better than Lalal.ai. It uses demucs v4 which is pretty state of the art. Check it out! Lmk what y’all think :slight_smile:

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I just fired up Logic to try out the new stem splitter (I can’t have opened it in a while as it needed to scan 277(!) plugins before opening :sweat_smile: ). The stem splitter requires M1+ to work. As a quick test I tried out a Bab L’Bluz track off their latest album, psychedelic North African themed rock, plenty of distortion and reverb,which I guess is probably a pretty tough test. Splitting took about 10 secs on a 3 minute track. the drums came out clean,the vocals pretty clean with some artefacts, the guitars also very clean. The bass has quite a few artefacts, possibly caused by reverb from the drums? But overall pretty good. I also tried Kae Tempest’s More Pressure, which I’ve split before using Lalal.ai so I could compare to that directly. Again, drums were super clean. Vocals good. Bass pretty good, better than the Bab L’Bluz track, though some higher bass parts ended up in the “Other” stem. Id’ say it’s at least as good as lalal.ai, but much more convenient and obvs free if you have Logic. I’d like to see some options for tweaking parameters to fine tune the split, but this is a pretty nice feature to have.

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This is what iam using, super on drums

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Awesome I’d be really excited if this works well.

Stem Roller is great, but I don’t have a compatible graphics card so it takes about 2+ hours to split a track.

If my iPad can do it in 10 seconds that would be awesome.

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This

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Any benefits vs Stemroller beyond newer Demucs builds?

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Sorry, can’t tell. I’m unable to open Stemroller in Sequoia 15.1. Says its malware.

Demucs GUI doesn’t take 15 min on a Mac M1 Max to split the stems. You can choose to run it through the CPU or GPU (MPS) if you have an M processor which speeds up things.

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How do these online options when compared to stem splitters in DAWs like Logic Pro? Are they cleaner? Thanks!

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Thanks for this, will give it a spin soon!

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Sounds like they all use the same algorithms in the end. Shouldn’t be any difference.

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Thanks, @clickclack777! Kind of sad though. I’d hope there might be some new approaches to this that can make a huge leap. :+1:

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Lala always been good to me