It all takes too long artefacts and bleed still abound and we struggle to find any meaningful use for it beyond vocal extraction, where it finds most of its success. Stem sellĪs the score shows, our opinion of Xtrax Stems hasn’t been radically changed by version 2. The speedier but less effective non-HQ alternatives have been dropped. Unchanged since v1, incidentally, Automatic HQ separates vocals only when it detects them, while Generic HQ separates the ‘lead’ melodic line constantly, be it a vocal, a synth, a trumpet or whatever. As for the speed boost, while Advanced is noticeably nippier than the miserably slow HQ algorithms, the process is still anything but quick, taking six minutes and 20 seconds to separate a six-minute-long MP3 over a 50mbps fibre connection. In our testing, we found it to be essentially as hit- and-miss as the other two, dependent upon the qualities of the source material but when it does ‘hit’, it makes a cleaner job of isolating vocals for use as acapellas and the creation of vocal-free backing tracks from the remaining material. Needless to say, this improvement in separation brings with it artefacts and audible ‘thinning’ of the target stem, as the process inevitably sends more and more of it to the other two stems, but Separation Balance is a very welcome addition to the software nonetheless, providing it with a much-needed degree of fairly extensive adaptability. The control is a triangular X/Y-style ‘pad’, with each apex representing the Drum, Music and Vocals stems, and moving the central dot towards a stem increasingly isolates its content. Xtrax Stems 2 introduces the Separation Balance control: an easy-to-use system for “reorganising the energy within the mix in real-time”, applied after the separation algorithms have done their thing. In the original Xtrax Stems, you could only mix the three stems as they were delivered by the separation algorithms, with no influence over their actual contents.

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