Guide

How to split a song into stems on a Mac

You have a finished song as one file and you want its parts back: the vocal on its own, the drums on their own, the bass on its own. Perhaps the session is gone, or you want an instrumental, or something to remix or practise over. Zammoth separates the song on your Mac, and the file is never uploaded anywhere.

Four tracks side by side after a split: vocals, drums, bass and other, each with its own waveform and controls. — One song after a split: vocals, drums, bass and other, each on a track of its own.

The steps

Bring the song in. Drop the audio file onto the arrangement. It lands on a track.
Right-click the track and choose Split into stems (AI).
Carry on working. The split runs in the background and takes a few minutes for a song. The Engineer cell in the top bar shows how far along it is.
Four new tracks appear: vocals, drums, bass, and other, which holds everything else.

The first time you do this, Zammoth downloads the separation model, about 166 MB. After that it works with no connection at all.

What you get

Each stem is an ordinary track. It has its own fader, its own mute and solo, and its own device chain, so everything you can do to a recorded track you can do to a stem:

Mute the vocal and you have an instrumental. Solo it and you have an a cappella.
Turn the drums up, EQ the bass, put a reverb on the vocal alone.
Export with Include processed stems ticked, and each track is written as its own file next to the full mix.

What to expect from the sound

Separation is very good and it is not perfect. Listen to each stem alone and you may hear the usual marks: a watery shimmer on cymbals, drum hits with their edges softened, small gaps where another instrument used to be, and a little of one part leaking into another. They matter most when you change the balance a lot or use a stem by itself.

Zammoth's engineer can measure those artifacts and repair them. Ask it:

clean up separation artifacts

It measures the shimmer, the softened transients, the gaps and the leakage on each stem, then reduces the noise, restores the attack of the hits, fills the gaps and glues the parts back together, without changing your balance. You can ask for both jobs at once with “split this into stems, then clean them up”. The engineer needs an Anthropic API key; the split itself does not.

Why it runs on your Mac

Most stem splitters are websites: you upload the song, wait, and download the parts. Zammoth runs the separation model on your own machine instead. It uses the open-source Demucs model, and the audio stays in your project folder from start to finish. That matters when the song is unreleased, or is not yours to hand to a third party.

Only split music you have the right to use.

Zammoth is a DAW for Apple silicon Macs with an AI audio engineer built in. The beta opens soon.

Join the beta