Seems that Logic is very clean in comparison… It’s like listening to solo source multitracks from Logic.!
STEM SEPARATION - LOGIC PRO 11 VS SPECTRALAYERS 12..(HI QUALITY MODE)
(SL on left; Logic on right)
Sadly, no other details supplied, how the tests were run etc…
Has been the case since the beginning, which is why I stopped upgrading SpectraLayers. Don’t really need more instrument types to unmix. Need usable stems.
Right now, I’d much rather unmix in Logic Pro, export the stems an then drag them over to wherever I want to use them (if not using Logic Pro for production).
I will do this on my MBP and shuttle them over via OneDrive even if I’m producing on a PC. The difference is that big.
I see you said you stopped upgrading, but have you had chance to just trial the improvements in v12.0.20 at all, for comparison/curiosity sake..?
(OT - The speed of update releases with accompanying leaps in quality seen in the wider market for stem separation tasks, are remarkable… what an age we live in…)
Just as a curiosity.
Relatively recently there has been a huge influx of posts regarding music stem separation in this forum.
Why do you all care so much about this? Is it majorly music archive restoration/remixing when there is no multitrack available anymore? Are you all beatmakers or electronic music producers that need to extract stems for using as samples?
No ill intent, I’m just genuinely curious.
I’m interested for ‘in-house’ remix/re-master projects I’ve occasionally been sent, where the multitrack was no longer around or easily accessible (back-catalogue material from 15, 20 or more years ago. Indeed, I looked into an album track or two from the late 1970’s earlier this year.!).
These days, plenty to pick from to achieve what you need…
I tested 9 of the best stem separation tools - lots of variation in quality depending on the task at hand; some ‘free’ to use, some not…
SL of course, is so much more.!
Meantime, am absolutely looking at other solutions for things like DeClick (can’t be waiting around for potential SL13 ‘improvements’ to come next year ;-)).
Henrique, I think you aren’t necessarily talking about me, here. For my part, I have a lot of original music mixed to stereo where the original RtR MT tapes are long gone and live DAT recordings which would certainly be improved with NR and rebalance of the mixes. Also, I have several multi-track songs where I have the stems and could stand to run NR and re-mix.
You know, if you have a band member who has passed, getting their parts solo’d is nice to maybe re-work those performances is another reason I have for separating music.
Yes.
Music restoration and ’inhouse’ remix/remastering here.
Got many old tapes, cassettes and minidiscs with my own work/bands, and some audience recordings of live concerts with big acts.
While on the subject, I recently got a DAT cassette with a pro studio recording of one of my old bands done in 1991. That same studio still exists and they converted the recording to 16/44.1 files. It all sounded useless though because of the harshness and terrible amount of treble.
Until I understood that the DAT tape was recorded with ’pre-emphasis’ - much like early CDs had - and it hadn’t been converted with that in mind, the decoding doesn’t seem to work when copying digitally. I found a table on the interweb where the pre- and de-emphasis curves were listed as data in Hz and dB. So I made my own ’de-emphasis’ curve in Pro-Q4 and eq:ed the files in SpectraLayers (VST3 module). It worked like a charm and sounded fine afterwards. Still needing some TLC though and that’s a challenge for this autumn, partly with the help of SpectraLayers. 
DAT or DCC? You are kind of mixing up the form factors as a DAT tape is like a miniature video tape like Beta and VHS; MiniDV being very similar to DAT…as DAT records and plays back data with similar angled patterns (helical)…and DCC is linear…surely you mean DAT tape because I doubt any pro studios were using DCC
DAT for sure, the tape is housed in a small cassette, much lika a DV cassette, so we call them DAT cassettes.
DCC came some years later and had an mpeg-like lossy compression, so it was nothing for the pro people. Much like the minidiscs that initially used a lossy compression format (called ATRAC). But later they introduced the Hi-MD, that could record in a nonlossy PCM format. Very nice for audience recordings with lavalliers on the collar. 
I was there, bro…still have my DAT machine (Sony DTC-690); tapes tho haven’t held up as well as audio cassette…DAT was my big purchase back in 1993…I recorded many gigs “straight” to DAT; we used a cassette recorder to get gain into the DAT-
Realistic PZMs>cassette machine>DAT tape
The issue was cost of recording media…DAT tapes were like $45US for a 90min IIRC
It’s just you used the term “DAT cassette” which kind of combines the DCC and DAT format
I still have a MD player and discs; I didn’t use it much at all tho
It could be that english is not my native tongue. I lived all my life in Sweden.
I for example do indie feature film audio mixing. While the music is often licensed from expensive libraries, quite often we only get the mix master file and that’s it.
Sometimes I want to break the music down into stems for easier altering it for the mix, or for better upmixing it into surround.
For the last project I was working on, we licensed a music track from a well known composer and the mix had several issues: it got mixed overly bright, on the edge of screechiness, when the composition swelled up (orchestra, female voice, brass), the dynamic compression used hit so hard it sounded like clipping and the brass like out of tune.
We checked back via the licensing platform with the composer to get a less extreme version - but he told them that it is the way he wants it to be.
Well, I then took the mix apart, repaired everything, reduced harshness and made it sound great in the cinema.
Well, I hope the thread has veered off course enough now to satisfy @henrique_staino ‘curiosity’… 
Back on topic..
Am still keen to hear again from @Trensharo regarding my earlier response… Interesting - Logic vs SL12 stem separation - SpectraLayers - Steinberg Forums
Haha! Indeed it has.
And it has undoubtedly steered my comprehension of this recent influx very positively.
Thank you all for your responses and please carry on!
I use it to analyse and transcribe music. Arguably, sound quality is not that crucial for this application, but it is more pleasurable to work when you have cleaner separation and better sounding stems. And I agree that Logic is significantly better than SL at the moment, while being many, many times faster.
I have a lot of old stereo recordings, some over 50 years old, so yes, I need the stem separation. In fact, i even have more recent stereo “live” recordings from my Edirol where the balance was off. And lastly, I have some studio recordings where rebalancing the stereo master is a lot less work (and money) than transferring 24-track analog tape to digital.
No.
Nothing they announced interests me. That’s a waste of time.
There have been no leaps in quality for SL Stem Separation. I have upgraded from 9 → 10 → 11 and each time the marketing and the reality simply were not in line with each other.
The Stems are still full of artifacts or bleed, etc. while Logic Pro produces far better results in 1/5th the time.
It doesn’t make sense to continue to invest in SL for this, when it’s literally faster to use Logic Pro to separate the stems on my Mac and send it over to my PC … than it is to use SL on the PC with a 3070Ti GPU accelerating the process (and get worse (often unusable) output).
Why would anyone base their purchase of Spectralayers only on unmixing, which isnt the core function of a spectral editor?
There is no spectral editor out there which offers the approach adopted by Spectralayers.
100%
Maybe it’s because of the hype of separation. But SL is primary an ingenious tool for spectral editing. My only wish is, that every funktion of SL would work exactly as is supposed to be and without any further flaws caused by a not so good technical implementation.