iZotope has release Photon, an AI-powered stem separation and audio enhancement utility that we’ve been testing for the last couple of weeks. Photon can be a standalone app and/or an ARA plug-in. It ships with 12 custom-trained models to tackle many of your music separation duties with more available to download on request.
Whether you’re working on a remix, deciphering the groove of a drum track, exporting an acapella, untangling multiple speakers in a podcast or interview, or cleaning up spoken word, Photon has a solution at the ready. Thanks to the AI, which employs your own computer’s GPU, the separation goes far beyond and is much more accurate than other browser-based utilities or even RipX. Import your source material, pick your model, let Photon work its magic. Thanks to the intuitive and well-executed interface, its very efficient and you can simply export your result in minutes.
iZotope Photon AI Stem Separation
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Photon’s machine learning models are custom-trained on iZotope’s own real-world audio data. Each model is made for a specific job, from splitting a music mix to cleaning up a windy interview. And the models run locally on your computer – no cloud processing required. The download is quite fat, being over 2 GB, but you never have to be tethered to the internet for the stem separation to happen. Even better, iZotope is committed to constantly improving Photon with new models being released in the Model Manager.
Photon is the first collaboration between the minds at iZotope and Boris FX…
The ARA plug-in allows Photon to run inside your DAW. Instead of a real-time buffer, Photon works from the entire clip, so it gets the full context of the file. Run several models together, and the processed audio cache carries results across every instance of a clip – so you can switch and compare without waiting.
Photon is super easy to use. Simply, drop in your audio or video file and export in the format you need. Working from audio? Choose from WAV, FLAC, or MP3. Working from video? Export in the same format as your source, with your video content left untouched.
Right now, the Drum Separator is where we’ve been having a blast. Photon works brilliantly separating the different elements, Kick, Hats, Snare, and percussive elements. We were flabbergasted listening to the isolated Kick drum on a reggae track to uncover the flap and undulation tones when the beater hit the skin.
The Holy Grail right now in AI stem separation for electronic musicians is splitting different synths from each other…
The Holy Grail right now in AI stem separation for electronic musicians is splitting different synths from each other, and unfortunately Photon cannot achieve this milestone…yet. But with the excellent voice separation models currently available, we hope that iZotope can accomplish this feat in 2027.
If stem separation is part of your workflow, Photon should definitely be something you investigate immediately. And if this is any indication of what we can expect from BorisFX and iZotope in the future…buckle up!
