The standalone app and ARA plugin runs 12 machine-learning models on your own GPU to split songs, drum tracks and dialogue into separate stems.
iZotope has released Photon, a dedicated stem separation and audio clean-up tool. It’s the company’s first release since Boris FX bought it in July, after Native Instruments, iZotope’s former parent company, was sold to inMusic. Photon runs as both a standalone app and an ARA plugin, and its 12 custom-trained machine-learning models process everything locally on your computer’s GPU, so nothing is uploaded to the cloud and there are no usage caps.
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On the music side, Photon splits a finished mix into four stems (vocals, drums, bass and everything else) and can break a drum track down further into kick, snare, hi-hat, toms and cymbals. That opens up a lot for remixing, practising along to a song or rebalancing an old recording when the multitracks are long gone. A separate voice model pulls vocals away from the music in two stems.
The rest of Photon is aimed at post-production. Its Voice Separator can pull apart up to six speakers recorded on one track. The Cinema model splits film and TV audio into dialogue, music and effects, and Voice Restore cleans up spoken recordings. A handful of other models target specific problems like excess reverb, wind and traffic noise.
The interface shows a layered waveform with each stem in its own colour, where you can preview, solo, mute and adjust levels before exporting to WAV, FLAC or MP3, or straight back to a video file. The ARA version works directly on clips in the timeline of hosts such as Pro Tools, Cubase, REAPER, Samplitude and Sequoia, and lets you switch between models without leaving the DAW.
Both RX 12 and Ozone 12 already include stem separation, but Photon is iZotope’s first tool dedicated to the job. Boris FX pitches it as a companion to RX rather than a replacement: “Think paint roller and paintbrushes,” it says. Photon covers a lot of ground quickly, while RX handles the detailed spectral repair.
Photon needs macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon, or Windows 10 or later with a GPU that has at least 4GB of VRAM. It’s available now from iZotope, with crossgrade pricing for existing iZotope users.
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