“AI-driven” plugins, whether legitimate machine-learning plugins or just buzzword-laden landing pages of VSTs, have quickly flipped the sampling, beat-making, and music production world. As little as five years ago, producers would painstakingly have to find snippets of drum breaks or vocals to use or spend hours perfectly EQing out instruments to isolate just the stems they wanted to flip into a beat.
I remember doing this to the point of exhaustion in my dorm room ten years ago, and it’s essentially why I stopped trying to become a beatmaker and hip-hop producer and pursued my secondary passion of making melodic club music.
Flash forward to modern times, and there’s a near-endless supply of plugins that can isolate vocals and remove stems for remixing, flipping, bootlegging, karaoke-ing, and more. But that doesn’t mean that they’re all even half as good as they claim to be. Seeing as this is a low-key obsession of mine, as I love finding obscure vocal runs to turn into ambient sound beds in my music, I decided to break down and share a short list of the best vocal isolation and stem separation tools that have been dominating the game over the past few years.
So let’s get into it.
DJ.Studio
DJ.Studio is the clear winner here for me. It started off as software that aims to be a DAW for DJs, but it’s since evolved and upgraded about 100 different times over the year that I’ve been using it, and it’s literally one of the coolest platforms in the game right now.
They recently rolled out a super powerful stem separation technology designed to create remixes on the fly, but it is equally powerful when I want to bounce out stems for a remix or bootleg. What I loved most about their stem separation tech is that it can export projects directly into Ableton, warped and everything. That’s so damn impressive!
Creating bootlegs and mashups is a great way to create quick content to share with your fans and followers, but when I was coming up as a producer, it always took a TON of legwork. It’s wild to see just how far the music production landscape has changed in a way that makes what used to take hours or even days only now take a couple of minutes. I cannot recommend this software enough, and they have a free trial so you can get your hands dirty with it, bounce some stems you want to flip, and not have to pay a dime.
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Acon Digital Remix
Starting the list off strong is Acon’s Remix software, which is probably one of the better-looking plugins on this list from an aesthetic point of view. Apart from just looking good, though, it comes with a handful of unique features that I found super helpful for stem separation, to the point where I was honestly a little shocked to ask why more plugins, even on this list, do not include such features.
The coolest feature I found when using this plugin is the sensitivity control, which helped me balance the artifacts’ prominence and the stem’s overall quality.
Plus, I loved the fact that it ran as a VST3 right in Ableton, which means I could get the audio directly into my DAW and start remixing and resampling the audio without having to go through the more convoluted steps of finding the output folder and dragging them into the project. Sure, these are small steps for me to do in the moment, but every time I’m taken out of the creative flow is a chance for me to lose focus or for the idea I’m working towards to slip away.
It also comes with a free trial period to test it out!
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RipX DAW
This started as a basic suite of software that is quickly evolving into a virtual DAW that’s completely changing the game regarding sampling. Not only does it isolate stems and perform many of the essential features that the other software does on this list, but it also allows for some of the most intensive and intuitive manipulations of those stems once isolated.
So, instead of isolating a vocal, it allows you to retrigger different pitches of that vocal, stretch the vocal, add effects to it, and almost anything else you could imagine.
I love using all these features on a channel before bringing it into Ableton. Still, the real magic starts when you begin reinterpreting all the different stems to reimagine the track you imported and analyzed completely.
I’ve had the opportunity to sit down and chat with their team a couple of times, and one of the other clever use cases they’ve seen users using their software for is to learn instruments, which I thought was super cool. I would have used this all the time as a young musician, and the thought of being able to isolate the guitar of some of my favorite John Mayer tracks, slow down the tempo so I could hear what notes his flying fingers were playing, and then practicing those same licks at my speed would have been a total game changer back in the day!
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Gaudio Studio
The two big things going for Gaudio Studio are that it’s browser-based and completely free to use. And while there are certainly higher-quality software and plugins on this list, the fact that you can use this completley free, instantly, and with very little friction means it’s excellent for testing out samples to see if you can get a vibe going without committing to the full extracting processor using more robust plugins like RipX or Izotope.
It’s at its best when isolating and separating vocals, making this also a super convenient tool for casual friends and bars looking to stock their Karaoke library before a big event, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also great for music producers trying to flip samples.
I enjoyed that it maps out all the songs and the stems, which could be a great learning tool for new producers and artists to have visual feedback on how their favorite songs are put together! This is far from an uncommon feature in this list, but the bright colors and simple layout, as seen in the image above, make Gaudio one of the most straightforward ways to do it.
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Lalal.ai
Lalal.ai first came onto my radar about a year ago, and when I gave it an initial test run, I was impressed by what it could do. But what’s even more astounding is just how far this company has come since it was brought to marketing not that long ago. I would go as far as to say that based on my experience, the X-factor with Lalal.ai is just how often and effectively they improve on their technology. It’s constantly getting better, and every month or two, when I return to flip another track, I find the tech better and the results more inspiring.
It’s also important to note that they are entirely cloud and browser-based. Another one of the better features of the company overall is that you purchase separation in minutes instead of an ongoing subscription or single and expensive one-time purchases. This means you can buy a bundle of sixty minutes of isolation and use it only when a track inspires you to sample.
This is a fantastic feature for those who want to test every once in a while but don’t think they’d get hundreds of dollars of value from it by purchasing a pricey piece of software outright. Considering just how damn powerful the algorithms and separation features are, and the ability to select just a single stem to isolate or a bundle of different stems like piano and vocals, was awe-inspiring when I was using it.
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Stemroller
This is free software that does its job pretty well!
And while there are more powerful stem separation tools on this list that I’ve used, most of the best come with a price tag to match their potency. I say all this not as a roundabout way of saying, “You get what you pay for,” because I do believe that this is one of the best free stem separation tools available. I’m just saying that it doesn’t exactly hold a candle to some of the other paid options on this list.
But this is a handy tool if you’re looking for a fast and easy way to isolate a vocal and create a karaoke mix. Plus, the fact that it’s cross-platform means that it’s an easy recommendation to my friends and community members, as it will work regardless of their platform.
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Simple Stems
The industry has come a long way since this quick little plugin was dropped about a year ago, but I still find that Stagecraft’s Simple Stems separation plugin is the fastest plugin by miles. And while it’s far from perfect, it does allow me to pull out bits and riffs from tracks fast enough, never to break my focus, and that’s the real X factor that I found. Many of these AI plugins take a ton of time to work their magic, and by the time I have the guitar riff or vocal phrase I want to sample, I easily could have lost my state of flow.
And while I’ve found that I get a lot of artifacts with Simple Stems, which sometimes are unique and pleasing in their own right, it at least gives me something ASAP that I can test out and try working with. If I love what I come up with, I can always repeat the process in a more nuanced isolator like RX 9!
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FADR
Like most other plugins and software on this lift, Fadr leans heavily into the buzzwords of the day, “AI-Powered” being the language at the forefront of their landing page. And while I usually raise my eyebrows at anything that mentions this, just cause it’s so overused, Fadr walks and talks the talk.
Please don’t take it lightly for its cheery and childish color palette. Fadr’s algorithms and stem extraction pack a punch, but that’s not even where it ranks on this list. What I liked the most about Fadr was the MIDI extraction functionalities, which were fun to play with. It streamlined the remixing and bootleg flips that I was working on with it, as I could extract the vocals from a track and then generate MIDI based on the instrumentation to use as a jumping-off point.
Sure, some compatible workarounds are native to Ableton, but, honestly, Ableton’s ‘Convert MIDI To Harmony” function is borderline unusable, even if the thought itself is super cool.
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iZotope – RX 9
RX 9 has long been the holy grail of isolation and audio repair but is expensive. The biggest problem with stem separation plugins, including almost all of the ones mentioned in this article, is that they leave artists and phase-style distortions in the audio. It’s par for the course with all plugins except this one.
Sure, it’s not 100% perfect, and I am not saying it’s a one-size-fixes-all plugin. However, the isolation technology in the plugin, coupled with a massive suite of audio repairing and other tools, gives me entirely new levels of control when isolating a stem and cleaning up the artifacts once isolated.
This comes with the obvious downside: the plugin costs a pretty penny, but if you see it more as the industry standard for vocal stem repairing AND isolation, then it’s totally worth it. I have used it in certain situations and for specific purposes in the studio for years and have always been impressed. It’s nowhere near as fast or intuitive as some of the other plugins on this list, but all of the best and most potent plugins in this industry come with a bit of an earning curve, and this is no exception.
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Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
