Hi friends,

what utility/plugin do you like most for isolating + removing drums from mixed songs?

despite recent AI boom, I'd say iZotope's RX module "Music Rebalance" does good job,
StemRoller does fairly decent isolation part (of various instruments), but there's lots of leftover drums in rest of the stems so far...

any other tips (maybe something like UVR5, but for drums specifically)?

cheers

 

RX has not been among my favorites for a long time since the release of UVR 5.6.
Currently, the ht_demucs model in that is my go-to.
A guy that I knew sometime back had worked on a specific model for isolating EDM drums which sounded pretty good for the amount of time trained and the size of the dataset.
It even worked somewhat well on acoustic drums due to the more or less similar nature of that category of sounds.
Sadly, I don't know if somebody still has it on their drive somewhere and the original dataset that was used for training got lost in a hard drive failure of sorts.

 

did some tests, "v4 htdemucs" in current UVR 5 is really good, gotta do more tests,
thanks for heads up!

 

I just used HitNMix Ripx to separate stems and it was super simple. You just install, drag a file to GUI and select a folder to send the stems to. Drums came out crisp and clear. Overall quality was decent enough for my needs but I have no idea how it compares to other stem separators. But as far as ease of use, you can't really muck anything up with Ripx. It has additional stem clean up features but I didn't have any need for them.

 

RipX is as good as I need, too. I have tested it a few times against RX and I have gotten better results from RipX every time. I tested it with both 2 or 3 times only, because it was better results. I haven't used it to separate individual drums though. For non-AI based options I have used DrumsSSX a lot, but it is basic frequency-based separation; or Drum Machine Designer in Logic, which is transient-based hitpoint separation like Recycle. I would like to try Zynaptiq Unmix:Drums but have not had a chance. (on mac). They should add this as a feature in RipX after you have separated the main stems. Maybe even options for stems of all groups/types.

 

At my last remix i tried this tool, and the results were very good
https://melody.ml/

 

I've made a Colab notebook (forked from a script from MVSEP.com) which uses multiple models to optimize separations quality (+0.3 SDR gain for drums compared to demucs_ft alone). It's one of best free solution available:
https://github.com/jarredou/MVSEP-MDX23-Colab_v2/

To compare different models, you can use mvsep's quality checker:
https://mvsep.com/quality_checker/multisong_leaderboard?sort=drums

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jan 18, 2024