These guides show how to remove or isolate vocals, and split a song into stems, in audio editors people already have. Each one follows the app's own manual or help pages, names the version and hardware the feature needs, and was checked on the date at its end. When an app cannot do the job on your computer, each guide ends with the browser alternative.
Audacity
The Audacity guide covers the two routes Audacity users have today. Intel's free OpenVINO Music Separation plugin splits a song into an instrumental and a vocal track, or into drums, bass, other instruments and vocals, using the Demucs model on your own computer. The older Vocal Reduction and Isolation effect, no longer bundled since Audacity 3.5.0, removes whatever sits in the center of a stereo mix; the guide explains its Analyze step, its actions and why it only works on some songs.
Logic Pro
The Logic Pro guide walks through Stem Splitter, which extracts vocals, drums, bass, guitar, piano and other parts on Macs and iPads with Apple silicon. It shows how presets and the submix work, how to get an instrumental in one pass, and where the stems appear in your project.
Ableton Live
The Ableton Live guide covers Stem Separation in Live 12.3 Suite: the four stems, High Speed and High Quality modes, merging parts into one track, separating only a time selection, and where Live saves the stem files.
Doing it in the browser
If your editor lacks a separator, or you just want the result, StemVocal does it in a web browser on any computer or phone:
- the vocal remover makes an instrumental;
- the acapella extractor keeps the vocals;
- the stem splitter gives vocals, drums, bass and other;
- remove drums from a song makes a drumless track.
Two songs a day are free, with credits for more. For the music around the separation, the BPM finder and key finder read a song's tempo and key, and the tempo changer and key changer move them.