The Best Stem Splitters in 2026

Riffloop is our product, so read our entry knowing that. To keep the rest fair we compare by use case rather than a score, we name what each competitor does better than us, and every price on this page comes from the vendor's own public pricing, checked in August 2026 and linked in the sources.

What we deliberately don't do: invent quality percentages. Separation quality depends on the song, the stem and the settings, and self-scored benchmarks from a vendor are worth nothing. Where quality genuinely differs in kind — two-stem tools versus six-stem tools, cloud versus on-device — we say so. For everything else, the honest test is the one you run yourself: the same song you know well, through two tools, listening to the part you'd actually practise or produce with.

Riffloop is a stem splitter built into a practice workflow. It takes your own files, a YouTube link or a SoundCloud link, separates six stems on your device — nothing uploaded — and surrounds them with the tools you practise with: A-B looping, slow-down with the pitch held, key change, chords over a beat grid, a click at the song's tempo, and synced lyrics.

The part no other tool here has: the Chrome extension works on the YouTube page itself, so a song you found while browsing never has to become a file. Full disclosure — this is our product, and this entry follows the same format as the other seven.

Price (our own pricing, public): free to start — five separations a day with all the practice tools; Pro at $5.95/month or $39/year; a one-time $99 Founder's Lifetime. No account needed to try it.

Where it isn't the fit: phones and tablets — it's a desktop hybrid (extension + web Studio), so if you practise away from a computer, Moises is the practice app to pick. And if you want stems as files for a DAW session rather than a practice loop, LALAL.AI or UVR fit that job better.

Moises is the practice app to pick when your practising happens away from a computer: native iPhone, iPad and Android apps, cloud separation of an uploaded file, and a wide suite around it — chord detection, pitch and tempo, lyric transcription, AI stem generation, video recording and setlists.

Price (US App Store, August 2026): free tier with a limited number of uploads a month; Premium $5.99/month or $39.99/year; a Pro tier at $29.99/month. Note that Moises doesn't publish a price table on its site without signing in, and says pricing varies by region and device.

Where it isn't the fit: songs that live on YouTube or SoundCloud — Moises works on files you give it, so those songs must be obtained and uploaded first. If that's your main source, this is the exact gap our full Riffloop vs Moises comparison covers.

LALAL.AI is separation as a service, aimed at people who want the resulting files: up to ten stem types (including strings and wind), batch processing, an API and a plugin, with quality that has kept it the default recommendation for production use.

Price (its own pricing page, August 2026): a free tier that processes 10 minutes; Lite at $7.50/month billed annually ($90/year) with 90 fast-queue minutes a month; Pro at $15/month billed annually with 250; and one-time minute packs from $50 for 750 minutes. One honest detail to know: minutes are deducted per file duration multiplied by the number of stem types you request, so a full multi-stem split of one song costs several minutes of quota, not one.

Where it isn't the fit: practising. There's no looper, no slow-down, no chords — you download stems and bring your own workflow. It's a factory, and a good one, not a practice room.

Ultimate Vocal Remover (UVR) is a free, open-source desktop app that runs the separation entirely on your own machine, with a menu of community-maintained research models to choose from. On the right settings it competes with the paid tools on quality — and costs nothing, forever.

The trade is effort: it's an install, the interface is an engineer's, choosing models and settings takes reading, and long files want a real GPU. For tinkerers that's half the appeal. For everyone else it's the reason the paid tools exist.

Price: free, open source, Windows and Mac. Where it isn't the fit: anyone who wants an answer in two clicks, a phone, or a practice workflow around the stems.

RipX DAW is in a category of one on this list: after separating, it lets you edit inside the stems — move, retune or delete individual notes, clean bleed, and rebuild the audio. If your goal is surgery rather than playback, this is the tool.

Price (Hit'n'Mix's own store, August 2026): one-time — RipX DAW $99, RipX DAW PRO $198, with discounts appearing regularly. No subscription.

Where it isn't the fit: quick splits and practising. It's a desktop production environment with a learning curve to match; hiring it just to mute a vocal is bringing a scalpel to butter bread.

Fadr's free plan is the most generous on the web: unlimited stem separations with MP3 downloads, plus key, tempo and chord detection and MIDI extraction, wrapped in remix and DJ tools rather than practice tools.

Price (its own site, August 2026): free for unlimited MP3-quality stems; Fadr Plus at $10/month or $100/year adds lossless WAV downloads, per-drum splits and its best separation quality.

Where it isn't the fit: the free tier's MP3-only downloads rule it out for serious production, and there's no looper or slow-down for practising — it's aimed at remixers first.

BandLab's Splitter is a free stem separator living inside a free, browser-based DAW and social music platform. If you already write or collaborate in BandLab, the stems land directly in your project — no exporting, no re-importing.

Price: free with a BandLab account; separation runs in their cloud. Where it isn't the fit: as a standalone splitter it's basic — fewer stem options and no practice tools — so it earns its place through the ecosystem, not the separation itself.

VocalRemover.org does one job with zero friction: drop a file in the browser, get a vocal and an instrumental back, free, no account. It also bundles small utilities — pitch and speed changers, a cutter, a key finder — that make it a handy toolbox for one-off jobs.

Price: free. Where it isn't the fit: it's a two-stem tool at heart — for isolating a bass line or muting just the drums you need a full splitter, and there's nothing built in for looping or slowing the result to practise with. For the karaoke use case specifically, compare our vocal remover, which does the split with the practice tools attached.

The quickest way to read this table: the first four rows are about what each tool accepts and where it runs — that's what actually separates them. Everything below is the workflow around the split.

Four questions settle it for almost everyone: what you're doing with the stems, where your songs live, where you'll use it, and how you'd rather pay.

All eight tools share the same physics: they reconstruct parts from a finished mix, so every output is an estimate. Vocals and drums come out cleanest; bass, guitar and anything grouped as "other" are the hardest, and a soloed stem can sound watery or carry ghosts of its neighbours.

This matters less than the marketing wars suggest. For practising, karaoke and remix sketches — the jobs nearly everyone hires these tools for — current separation is comfortably good enough, in every tool on this page. What it is not, anywhere, is a substitute for the original multitrack. A cleaner input helps every tool: lossless sources separate audibly better than low-bitrate rips.

The practical consequence: don't choose on quality claims — including ours. Choose on workflow, run one song you know intimately through your shortlist, and listen to the stem you'd actually use.

Every price and plan detail above was read from the vendor's own public page in August 2026, so you can verify each one rather than trust a roundup — ours included.

• Moises — the US App Store listing (its site shows a full price table only after signing in).
• LALAL.AI — lalal.ai/pricing, including the per-stem-type minute accounting.
• RipX DAW — the Hit'n'Mix store.
• Fadr — fadr.com/plus.
• Ultimate Vocal Remover — the project site; free and open source.
• BandLab — bandlab.com; VocalRemover.org — the site itself.
• Riffloop — our pricing and daily-limit help page, public without an account.

Prices move. If something here has gone stale, tell us via support and we'll correct it — this page carries its check date for exactly that reason.

Keep reading: the full Riffloop vs Moises comparison, our AI stem splitter, splitting a YouTube song into stems, the vocal remover, how to isolate an instrument on YouTube, or browse everything in Tools and Learn.