Apple’s AI-driven Stem Splitter audio separation tech has hugely improved in a year

Imagine that you have a song file—drums, guitar, bass, vocals, piano—and you want to rebalance it, bringing the voice down just a touch in the mix.

Or you want to turn a Lyle Lovett country-rock jam into a slamming club banger, and all that's standing between you and the booty-shaking masses is a clean copy of Lovett's voice without all those instruments mucking things up.

Or you recorded a once-in-a-lifetime, Stevie Nicks-meets-Ann Wilson vocal performance into your voice notes app... but your dog was baying in the background, and your guitar was out of tune. Can you extract the magic and discard the rest?

Without access to the original recording project files or master tapes, jobs like these have always been slightly difficult. Specialized tools or software could extract specific sounds, often the vocals, sometimes through crude techniques based around high- and low-passing the audio, but ...