I’m using a brand new M4 Mac Mini Pro and it’s taking 15-20 minutes to demix a song. Is this normal? I was using an intel mac mini before and it took about 6 minutes. This is my first song unmix that I’m trying. And I’m using the HIGH setting. Any thoughts?
This reminds me of my 1994 Turtle Beach Quad days and applying a compressor…go eat dinner and come back lol.
UPDATE, so as I’m unmixing a song in SL12, I decided to unmix a song in SL 11. I set SL12 to balanced mode. Still taking about 15-20 min to process. When SL11 got done (set to HIGH) SL12 was still 8 minutes left in processing power. The countdown timer is wildly incorrect also. It’s basically like downloading file, giving you varied amounts of time and it steadily increases as it’s UNMIXING. Here is a screen shot of both.
You are not using GPU in SL12.
Check you settings and if you have set it to GPU you need to redo your settings to make them stick. (I guess SL imported setting from SL11 but SL will use CPU untill you redo settings)
Without the GPU doing the heavy lifting you will not see the extreme setting
Where do I do that at? I looked in the settings. Is this in the Mac system or SL somewhere? I’ll keep looking. Thanks for the tip
You won’t see them on a “standard” Apple Silicon build - @Shortstop may be thinking you were on Windows.
I have no doubt the industry in general will put development dollars into Apple Metal once there’s enough of us running Apple Silicon to make it economically feasible. There’s existing threads about access to Metal being restricted which I don’t really understand, but for us here today, we’re mostly in CPU-land. Looks like they’ve changed SL12 to the chowdsp fft library from PFFT in SL11, but I have no idea yet what kind of result that will give us.
I get multiple cores spiking 100% for between ~30s to a few minutes each time I start SL12 but without loading a project. I can’t identify why that is on my M3 Ultra, but it clears up by itself.
We’ll be seeing some maintenance updates upcoming according to other posts. I’m being patient and keeping SL11P handy 
@illynoise
My mistake. I should have known from the screenshots that you are on MacOS.
SL12 a huge leap forward for productivity, thousands of development hours coding to carefully craft a more refined product which will elevate our workflows!!!
AFAIK Robin (the developer) is still working on getting support from Apple for Apple Silicon. Given that they (Apple) have a competing product they may not see this as a priority (just my 2c).
FWIW I’m currently testing a new build (PC) with NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and SL12 processes a 4min recording at “High” in 1m 28s – a live recording with drums, bass, vocals, piano and guitar.
Also in Windows unmix Song with SL12 is incredible slow. 1 hour for a song of 3 minutes!!
Describe your computer system hardware please.
Windows 11 Home. 15-9400T CPU. 64-bits. 8 GB RAM
(Spectralayers 11 pro worked normal)
same issues here,
M4 Pro
64GB unified RAM
14 core CPU (10p/4e)
20 core GPU
5:20 song, unmix @ “best”? quality, 22% done, 18m 25s remaining, total time to unmix, 30 minutes…Was HORRENDOUS quality (drums and vocals were ok, rest was unusabe)
Similar unmix on V11
Windows 11
AMD 5950x
AMD 6700XT GPU
UNDER 7mins.
You’d think they’d have done that BEFORE releasing a PAID “update”
SL 12.0.0 is a “banana software”, getting mature at the customers…
Yep, SL12 Unmix is much slower than SL11 and I am using Studio Mac M4. Letting SL12 work in the background is even worse, what took 4 minutes in foreground changed to 16 minutes in background. PS My Logic Pro 11.2 does a better unmix in 4 seconds. Huge disappointment.
I believe Apple incorporates 4-stem spleeter code for Logic. I no longer use Apple products, but a quick search shows 4-stem. Yeah, probably 4 seconds for that Wouldn’t surprise me at all…it’s only looking for 4 families of stuff.
Spleeter works pretty badly for a lot of more complex demixing I do of old recordings, no matter which (of many) companies integrate spleeter I’ve tried.
As to SL12 pro demucs and the fact that it’s looking for 7 families of source, I just test demixed a stereo wav of the 1977 “At Midnight” by Rufus. Selecting “extract sax/brass first” option.
Took roughly 11 minutes for the initial demix (Win11 pro 24h2, rtx 2070 set as primary mode in both sl and win).
Results and time fine by me.
Moving further to separate the piano/guitar in a bit more detail…and demixing mixed drums into separate files, separated Chaka’s 4pt harmonies to separate tracks, moving all the files to mono…separating the reverb to separate tracks, normalizing here & there, gating here & there, loading all into a new Nuendo project to play around
with…
Nice so far!
The world has come a long way from 2020 spleeter!
Actually 6 stems. And it is pretty usable. Still not as good as SL. But SL12 on a mac m series, is just a NO GO right now in the studio. If I have a client, we’re not going to wait for 20 minutes for something Logic can do in less than 2.
Hope that something is being looked at. I’m not able to use it. I can still use SL11. Right now I’m a beta tester for SL12 on a mac it seems. That’s fine. I’m supporting the product. I believe in it. Just like I support PG and Wavelab. I just don’t think this was tested well enough on the newer computers. 20 minutes in 2025 is not acceptable IMHO.
I’m trying to staying away from Windows SW/HW but Apple’s restrictions may make me reconsider. Is the configuration you describe a custom machine or a off the shelf setup? What’s the price tag for it? Thanks.
Also MacMini M4 here (not Pro). But to be honest, I didn’t pay attention to the speed either. Certainly a difference if you also click on Sax&Brass. Apart from that, I don’t care how fast. The difference in quality is fantastic and decisive for me. Plus the other new possibilities. If it takes longer now, that’s fine.
Maybe you should write to Apple to remove restriction of coding in their OS, so Robin and team can optimize it. It´s not Steinberg´s or Robin´s fault, it´s that shitty company called Apple and their fucked up policies
