iZotope Photon is a local stem separation and denoising tool that runs off your GPU

iZotope has launched Photon, an AI-powered stem separation and audio cleanup tool that’s powered by 12 custom-trained models and processes audio locally on your computer’s GPU rather than uploading files to the cloud.

Photon can split music samples into four stems, break drums into individual elements, isolate vocals, separate multiple speakers and clean up noisy spoken-word recordings. iZotope says it’s built on 12 custom-trained machine-learning models and is the first collaboration between the minds at iZotope and parent company Boris FX, joining two world-class research teams to create cutting-edge machine-learning models.

Demix and Denoise

Photon’s machine learning algorithms are split into two categories: Demix and Denoise, with the former handling stem separation, and the latter aimed at cleaning up noise from audio recordings.

Among the Demix algorithms, Photon offers the ability to separate music into four stems, while drums can be split into five stems – with one of each for kick, snare, hi-hat, toms and cymbals. Meanwhile, Voice Separator is able to detect and separate up to six different voices from an audio recording and place them into individual stems – particularly useful for processing the unique timbre of people’s voices differently. You can also use the Voice algorithm to quickly separate a voice from music for quick instrumentals or acapellas, while a Cinema model can split a video or audio file into dialogue, music, sound effects, and everything else.

Moving onto the Denoise side, these algorithms are aimed at cleaning up noise from recordings, like unwanted sounds in a speech recording, or less-than-ideal room noise and reverb. This category has three models: Voice Restore, which enhances speech and handles noise; Indoor / Indoor Noisy, which tackles room noise and reverb; and Outdoor / Outdoor Traffic / Outdoor Wind is built to tackle urban noise like traffic and heavy wind.

Plugin workflow and other features

As an ARA2 plugin, Photon lets users adjust stems or fix background noise inside their DAW. iZotope says users can run several models together and switch between them without waiting. Supported hosts include Pro Tools, REAPER and Cubase on both Mac and Windows, plus Sequoia and Samplitude on Windows.

The plugin comes with the ability to preview, which will speed things up when you’re working with longer clips, and a Model Manager which lets you download new and updated models without the need to reinstall.

Photon exports to WAV, FLAC and MP3 or to video with the original video stream kept. It opens formats including WAV, MP3, FLAC, AIFF, AAC, M4A, MP4, MKV, MOV, MXF and MPG. For video files, it reads the audio track and can write the processed audio back.

Photon is available now as a standalone app and as an ARA2 plugin, priced at $349 or $259 during a cyber sale running through 7 December. It’s compatible with Apple Silicon Macs and machines running Windows 10 or later.

Learn more at izotope.com.